Translated material
Closed the topic
The premiere of the play “Tararabumbia” was performed at the Chekhov Anniversary Week
I don’t know how those who rarely go to the theater will react to Dmitry Krymov’s new performance - maybe they will laugh, or maybe they will curse, call “Tararabumbia” a mockery of the great, a skit, etc. But I know for sure that for our brother, the theater critic, as well as for any inveterate theatergoer, Krymov did more than anyone else. He, as they say, closed the topic.On the day of Chekhov’s anniversary, the “School of Dramatic Art” performed in front of the audience with a clown parade all the cliches of Chekhov’s productions from the classic Soviet ones to today’s avant-garde ones, laughed at the stupidity of the anniversary celebrations and at the same time showed a performance in which there was a lot of non-festive love and tenderness for that very hero, which these days is addressed from all stands as nothing less than “respected closet.” By the way, there was also a closet.
The narrow road of the stage, like a podium, ran between the rows of spectators, emerging from the peeling doors of the estate portal with columns. The performance began with a little boy in only shorts collecting scattered lotto on this road. (Then it turns out that the road does not stand still, but moves like a conveyor belt - sometimes against the movement, and the actor cannot reach its end even by running, or sometimes along with the movement, and then the heroes whistle along it, like on a skating rink .) Well, then the solemn Igor Yatsko came out in black, with a drum major’s baton and exclaimed: “Tararabumbia! Procession! And Chekhov’s regiments moved from left to right, as if in front of a mausoleum, unstoppably and always in one direction. A brass band, followed by soldiers tied with hoods, all wearing Chekhov's beards and mustaches (“The music plays so merrily!”, “They are leaving us!” says the finale of “Three Sisters.” Quotes themselves come to mind when we see new ones heroes). The Three Sisters regiment is rounded out by a tiny, bravely marching puppet soldier. Soldiers will pass by, and tall women will come out, stilts under their long dresses. The beauties will sing roulades: “My sins-and-and!”, timidly ask the audience: “Take me to your place” and ask someone in the audience: “Are you from Moscow?” One leads by the hand a boy in a sailor suit - either the drowned Kolya, Ranevskaya’s son, or the grown-up Bobik. The music of Alexander Bakshi, filling the action from beginning to end, sometimes bursts out with solemn marches, operatic arias, choirs, a drum show on buckets, accompanying dashing hip-hop, and sometimes fades into the background with the cries of seagulls, the howling of the wind, the noise of a train.
About 80 people take part in the performance, and it seems that the columns of Chekhov's heroes are endless. Exclamation: “Writer Boris Alekseevich Trigorin!” - and here comes the regiment of the Trigorins, all in straw hats, checkered pants and with fishing rods. Fat Trigorins and thin, almost boys, youthful playboys and older Trigorins, puffed up with importance and funny. We theatergoers have seen all sorts of them - and now here they are. Three-meter Nina is sad: “I would like to be in your place,” Trigorins are up to her waist. The most textbook scenes, the most common places, the most desperate director's interpretations are cataloged. There's enough hint here. A woman in white with an umbrella walked slowly by. “The late mother walks through the garden in a white dress,” the audience remembered Ranevskaya’s words; “It’s the dead mother!” - Sprekhstalmeister Yatsko rejoiced. A couple of weeks ago, exactly the same deceased woman silently walked through the play “Uncle Vanya” by Andrei Konchalovsky.
Along the road we passed a glassed-in terrace on which they were dancing, followed by another tiny terrace like a glass. In it, Treplev tore his manuscripts to shreds, and then from the shot, streaks of blood flooded the glass of the windows. Now the wounded Konstantin with their heads wrapped in bandages moved along the road. One is middle-aged, bearded (I remember, I remember, he was like that in Lev Dodin’s The Seagull!), the other is in a wheelchair, the end of the bandage is fluttering, Arkadina follows. In the third, the girl Arkadina breaks from the bandage like a tied child. The latter is wrapped in bandages all over, like a mummy, he moves with difficulty with his legs, led by Arkadina, like a goat on a string. The bandage breaks, and she throws out just like in the play: “Ragged!”, and the mummy-son, having fallen, wriggles like a worm and plaintively screams: “Mom! Mother!"
A crowd of people in old coats and fur coats with suitcases leaves the house, and the portal goes right after them and stops at the other end of the podium, facing us on the wrong side with the inscription “V. garden lion.", "V. the garden is up,” the long-haired Firs hits the door with his whole body, but is carried away by the conveyor belt. Musicians are walking, circus performers are marching, seagulls on long flexible “fishing rods” are flying in the heights, mace seagulls are flying in the hands of a juggler, an actress in a bride’s dress unfurls giant wings and screams disgustingly like a seagull.
Victor Platonov made an incredible number of puppets: small and large puppets march, a long fish “swims”, occupying the entire stage, they carry plywood children - these are Bobiki and Sofochka (“Bobik is cold!” Natasha laments), Trigorin rides with Nina in the form hugging “Nanai boys” (circus horseman Igor Yatsko exclaims: “A writer and an actress two years later!”). From a plank carriage with the inscription “oysters” (in which the writer’s body was transported to Moscow), a huge Chekhov’s head is taken out, and the heroes pass it from hand to hand. A multi-meter neck stretches behind the head like a snake, ending in a pair of boots.
Remembering how Krymov said that for one of the dolls Platonov brought his jacket, given to him by Rezo Gabriadze (see Vremya Novostey, January 21) , I still want to find this doll. Here it is: three sisters are leading Andrei, tall, bespectacled, ridiculous, as if sick. (I remember: Mytishchi’s “The Cherry Orchard” with life-size puppets was recently nominated for the “Golden Mask”.) Oksana Mysina, a famous actress who participates in the performance on an equal basis with others, plays the violin for Andrei. A loud farting sound is heard, the sisters hastily make excuses, pointing to the doll’s swollen belly (“He’s gained weight, it’s nothing, nothing”), and quickly take him away, while the obscene roar continues to sound like cannonade. Decreasing and becoming a joke is also not new. Down with respect - it ties the hands and the imagination, and fecal plots are not alien to Chekhov, the doctor and humorist.
Another option for today: Chekhov is criminal. Fedotik advances towards the presenter, bending down and spreading his arms wide with a Finn, muttering threateningly: “This is a knife, to pick your ears...”
The catalog of production stamps continues with a list of all options for anniversary celebrations; their participants form May Day columns of demonstrators. Yatsko proclaims: “And now Soviet writers greet Anton Pavlovich Chekhov!” Lying on their stomachs on high stools and spreading their arms like wings, people-airplanes with flags with the inscriptions “Furmanov”, “Tolstoy”, “Feuchtwanger” ride out, the last one rides “Sholom Aleichem” on a unicycle circus bicycle, and behind the column a man backs away and smokes exhaust Well, yes, I also thought it was a stupid idea to name ships and planes after writers. Behind the planes is the “USSR team” in synchronized swimming in red swimsuits. This is already a pure skit, but it also reminds of something. I don’t know if Krymov saw “The Seagull” by Andrei Zholdak, but there the characters endlessly depicted swimming on a dry stage. Next is the Elsinore delegation (we understand: this refers to quotes from “Hamlet” in “The Seagull”), etc. Wherever you point, everything has already been, was, was. Chekhov has everything - just like in Greece. The funniest column of congratulators is the inflated “delegation of the Bolshoi Theater of the USSR”, a group of comrades in fur hats, black jackets with orders and red folders with addresses in their hands, but in tutus, moving their feet in ballet slippers. The imagination of the young artist of the play, Krymov’s student Maria Tregubova, is overflowing, but this parody picture does not seem too hyperbolic. We'll see more of that in the anniversary year.
By the end, the column leaves in overcoats and earflaps tied under the chin, reminiscent not of the officers from the Three Sisters, but of the soldiers of the Patriotic War and prisoners. Military and camp Chekhov also visited our theater. Tuzenbach breaks out of the column: “Irina, say something!” They don’t let him in, and Irina runs after him, shouting: “What? What?" The column leaves, carrying the baron, and the empty conveyor belt rushes at wild speed, and the alarming roar reminds of trains rushing past.
“Tararabumbia” is the Chekhovian mess that will be bubbling in our heads by the end of the year. And now it’s already gurgling. It’s good that this performance started the anniversary year. It doesn't matter if you like everything about it. But now, after each Chekhov premiere, which will rain down on us for months to come, we will begin to say: “Do you remember how it was with Krymov?” As for reverence for shrines, everyone understands this in their own way. In the next performance of the anniversary week, which the Chekhov Festival gave us, in the circus “Donka” by the Swiss Daniele Finzi Pasca, on the stage there is a jar with the head of Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova preserved in alcohol. And nothing.