No brakes

“Sobbing” by Krzysztof Bizet at the Praktika Theater

“Praktika,” one of our main “new drama” theaters, is not afraid of harsh drama, but, on the contrary, has a taste for it and raises it to the banner. But even on this stage, the play “Sobbing” by 40-year-old Pole Krzysztof Bizet, at once dry and emotional, harsh and scary, immediately began to look like one of the best in the repertoire. This text was directed by Viktor Ryzhakov, who has become famous in recent years for performances based on Ivan Vyrypaev, in which logocentric plays, unusual for Russian theater, were transformed into performances seething with passion and keeping the audience in suspense from the first minute. This time, Ryzhakov gave three women's monologues - mother, daughter and grandmother - to one actress, Svetlana Ivanova, with whom he worked on the play "Genesis No. 2". And leaving the artist alone on an empty stage, he again made it so that the heroine, pouring out, spewing out, releasing female screams-monologues in bursts into the hall, kept the audience literally under current for an hour and a half, not allowing them to relax.

Irina Kiseleva did an excellent translation, in the speech of each of the women there is time, upbringing and character, and this speech flows in a mad stream, jumping from the main thing to the little things, leaving behind logic and reason. The mother, a woman over 40, who was used to managing foremen in something like our housing office, has now lost her job and fallen into depression. Languishing from hopelessness and humiliation, her husband’s infidelities and scandals with her teenage daughter, she literally went crazy for an expensive coat that she thought could change her life. With the thoroughness of madness, she thought through how she would steal it, and having stolen it, she could not bear the fear of punishment and, with the same thoroughness, she cut the luxurious thing into tiny pieces. The story is, in essence, worthy of Dostoevsky. Her 17-year-old daughter lives at parties, despises her parents, and admires her cheerful, half-crazy grandmother, who is having conversations with her deceased grandfather. And then, for the money needed to buy some unusual pants that will make everyone envious, she gives it to her former boyfriend in the car with disgust. The third story is from those very conversations between the grandmother and her deceased husband, going on without any tears or unnecessary sentimentality, in the businesslike spirit of visiting a sick person - arguments, news stories, etc. All this flows in a completely optimistic tone, until it turns into a scary story precisely because of this cheerful intonation about how she was killed in her own apartment by drug addicts in search of money. And in the last words of this story, looking from somewhere from the side at her mutilated body in the bathroom, the old woman asks in confusion: “Am I alive or am I already with you?”

Those who insist that our “new drama” playwrights write gloomy plays, let them listen to this one, in which the poor realities of domestic life are reflected as in a mirror.

Ryzhakov gave each of the women one technique: the mother, as if at a presentation report, holds in her hands large black magnets, which from time to time, as if trying to clearly structure her speech point by point, she attaches to the backdrop (this painful logic further enhances the schizophrenic feeling from her monologue). A girl, ringing in high notes, unstoppably waves her arms against the background of a club video with some flying stars, a hoarse-voice grandmother is torturing an accordion. All this, to be honest, is not particularly necessary, and sometimes even annoying - the frantic Svetlana Ivanova can clearly play without supports. After all, the director has already given her the main thing - this is a frantic pace, taking off, collapsing and not braking on steep turns, a pace from which the audience begins to gasp and clutch at their pounding hearts, and then freezes and almost does not breathe in the pauses. And here there is no time to curl your lips from obscenities in the speech of a little slut no one needs, who will never have to move to live with her beloved grandmother. May God grant you to endure this, to survive this.

Dina GODER