Translated material
With confidence and peace
New drama from “The Baltic House”
The St. Petersburg theater festival “Baltic House” is coming to an end. The beginning was shocking: for the opening they played the grandiose Nyakroshyusovsky “Idiot”, which lasted more than five hours. Then the most spectacular “Hamlet” staged by another Lithuanian star - Oskaras Korsunovas. The Lithuanian landing continued with three chamber productions by young Vilnius directors, students of Rimas Tuminas. The mainstay of the festival’s mid-course was the provocative play by the Estonian theater NO99 “How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare.” Thirty-two-year-old Tiit Ojasoo, who recently shocked St. Petersburg with a fervently hooligan political performance about demography (“GEP” - hot Estonian guys), together with his regular collaborator, artist Ene-Liis Semper, composed a play-pamphlet about cultural politics. And the Russian public was most struck by the fact that the Minister of Culture herself came to this satirical production, the main target of which was the incompetent and stupid woman - the Minister of Culture of Estonia, and even spoke at the end, demonstrating amazing political freedom, tolerance and open-mindedness.The shock finale of the Baltic House should be the Romanian production of the ever-present brawler and visionary Andrei Zholdak, Life with an Idiot, but for now the main St. Petersburg festival has unexpectedly turned to what is considered a Moscow specialty - a new drama. Firstly, the international competition of chamber plays New Baltic drama 2011 was announced, uniting Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Russia. As a result of the competition, applications for which are already open, one play will be selected from each country; the winner will receive a cash prize, and his play will be released into international circulation. There was a scandal here: at the presentation of the competition, respected St. Petersburg playwrights expressed dissatisfaction with the composition and supposed tastes of the Russian jury, the requirement for intimacy and the insufficient number of future winners. Nevertheless, we can consider that the competition was successfully announced.
The next “new drama” event was the festival screening of Andrei Prikotenko’s production of “Lerka” based on three plays by Vasily Sigarev - “Ladybugs Return to Earth”, “Black Milk” and “Phantom Pains”. And here the theater looked much less victorious. Prikotenko united three plays by the fate of one heroine - Lerka - and the post-perestroika decade. “Ladybirds,” where the characters are about twenty, begins with a television statement from the State Emergency Committee, “Phantom Pains,” where they are about thirty, begins with Yeltsin’s abdication of the throne. However, there are no longer any significant signs of the times in the performance, but it is full of noisy anguish and false spiritual soarings, partly suggested by the author, but mostly completed. But what Sigarev is really strong at - lively dialogue, an accurate sense of street language - is not heard at all; The actors pronounce funny and juicy slang with such effort and artificiality, as if they live in another country and have never heard natural speech. (As a theater studies student said several years ago at the first and last St. Petersburg festival “New Drama”: “In Moscow they swear in Moscow, we don’t say such words.”) But here’s what’s curious: despite all the shortcomings of the performance and obvious acting problems of the Baltic House theater, in whose repertoire it is, the audience accepts the performance well, rejoices at the opportunity to recognize the signs of the past, favorite words and their own life in general. This means that, no matter what they say, a new play is absolutely necessary for classical St. Petersburg.
This is also evidenced by the third “new drama” story of the current festival - several performances from the “ON.Theater” project at the Lensovet Theater, the St. Petersburg analogue of the Moscow “Open Stage”, which allows young directors on a competitive basis to receive small money from the city for an independent production. And although criticism stubbornly insists that there is neither the soil nor the audience for a tough new drama in St. Petersburg, almost all new directors have chosen it - plays by Oleg Bogaev, Martin McDonagh, Natalya Vorozhbit, Elena Isaeva, Olga Pogodina. So far it is clear that this material is difficult and unusual for both directors and artists; the directors, in some confusion, try to approach him with familiar techniques, play the fool, turn on loud percussive music, and the actors, embarrassed by the harsh language and behavior of the characters, shout and make comics at all hours. The path that the Moscow new drama has taken in training actors in almost ten years has not yet been completed here, but it is clear that everything will happen. There are already artists who find sincerity, peace and trust in the new text, like Vasily Reutov from the Bolshoi Drama Theater, playing today's documentary “Notes of a Young Doctor” - a monologue of a Russian surgeon recorded by Elena Isaeva. So there is reason to expect that in the future new plays will be staged in St. Petersburg no less often than in Moscow, Perm, Krasnoyarsk or Yekaterinburg.