Coffin with music

On the Alexandrinka tour in Moscow they played the premiere of “The Taming of the Shrew”

The first round of Alexandrinka's tour in Moscow consisted of two performances. It started with “Ksenia. Love Stories" by Valery Fokin. This production was already in Moscow in the spring at the Golden Mask and was not particularly successful, although in St. Petersburg, they say, the play about Saint Xenia of Petersburg, which relies on local patriotism, is going with a bang. When the tour was planned, no one knew that “Xenia” would fail in Moscow, but in any case, the driving force behind Alexandrinka’s visit was not her, but “The Taming of the Shrew” by the Lithuanian star Oskaras Korsunovas, who promised to show the Shakespeare premiere in Moscow even before St. Petersburg, where the theater will open its season only in two days.

Moscow has seen Korshunovas more than once, from his very first, almost student performance based on Kharms “There to Be Here” in the early 90s to “Hamlet”, which was brought to the NET festival a year ago. In addition, in Moscow five years ago he staged “The Death of Tarelkin” at the Et Cetera Theater with Kalyagin himself. Korshunovas has not yet become one of the main Moscow favorites, but theatergoers highly value him for his always spectacular and rigid form, intense rhythm, for flexible actors who tend to be eccentric, among whom there are always those who charge the audience with their hot emotionality, like the red-haired Rasa Samuolite, who played Ophelia. Korshunovas has been directing abroad for a long time, and although, apparently, it is not easy for him to work on a foreign field (the Moscow “Tarelkin” was not a success), but this time they said that the director would repeat his three-year-old production from the “Comédie Française” in Alexandrinka. and, therefore, will show us something reliable, already tested and successful. For those who have not seen the Paris performance, it is difficult to say to what extent the St. Petersburg performance was a repeat of it, but it certainly did not turn out to be a success.

Although this “Taming...” began funny and lively: even with the curtain closed, a guy in a T-shirt and jeans with an open bottle in his hand jumped onto the stage with abuse, joked around, scolded the attendant who was chasing him for calling him a boor, bickered with spectators demanding Shakespeare (probably decoys). Then he began to talk about the girl with whom he broke up, and in the end he admitted that he was an actor (Valentin Zakharov), lay down on the floor and, when the curtain parted, he turned out to be the Shakespearean drunkard Sly, for whom the Lord’s servants played “The Taming of the Shrew.” When the curtain opened, everything immediately ceased to be lively and cheerful. The stage was densely packed with all sorts of junk and looked a little like a theater warehouse (artist Juraite Paulekaite). An iron cage, sticks, fragments of giant plaster casts, some kind of rotating things and structures with ladders, a bathtub, a coffin, wardrobes with costumes, clothing mannequins, blanks with wigs on the upper tiers, and so on. In the corner behind the makeup table there was a place for the Lord in a robe, and the other actors on stage, dressed in black, for some reason ran around barking like dogs, making faces, shouting to each other and, breathing like dogs, hanging out their tongues. The music was thundering, something was rushing and falling all the time, the lights were flashing, smoke was pouring out, someone was pretending to be rock musicians. The cute sleeping Sly, laid in an empty bathtub, was put on white drawers and a cap, and when he woke up, he began to play the same game: making faces, screaming and fussing.

The story turned out to be very strange. On the one hand, the decoration of the “belly of the theater” is excessive, but nevertheless looks quite modern in its dirty richness and ambiguity. On the other hand, there were actors who played not just loudly and rudely, but somehow archaically, as in the pompous Alexandrinka of the 80s under Igor Gorbachev. It is impossible to believe that the best actors of this theater became like this - Vitaly Kovalenko, Igor Volkov, Andrei Shimko and even the most tender Yulia Marchenko. But, most importantly, in this tattered production it was difficult to recognize Korshunovas. When writing it, he was clearly not in his best shape. The stage on which something was rattling and running all the time caused painful bewilderment.

Several bright historical costumes with long skirts and fluffy trousers hung on clothing mannequins, and during important scenes, heroes in black “overalls” approached them from behind, inserted their arms into the sleeves and led the stage like puppets - with excessive, puppet-like gestures. The rest of the time, the actors climbed up and down structures, carried some objects, pushed or squeezed each other, and generally desperately feigned activity. The current young premier of the theater, Dmitry Lysenkov, in the role of Petruchio was no different from the others - he also grimaced, ran around like he was covered in scum, and after five minutes of action he was already covered in sweat. A couple of times he switched from a scream to the rumbling bottoms of a seducer, but still we learned no more about his hero than he said about himself. The beautiful Alexandra Bolshakova in the role of Katarina played just a cantankerous doll (although I really liked the trick when she came out to the groom, twirling interlocking clothes hangers in her hands, like girl fighters twirl knives in oriental films). The completely traditional lyrical couple of the curly-haired lover Lucentio (Tikhon Zhiznevsky) and the pretty blonde Bianca (Maria Lugovaya) did not save the matter.

It was not possible to meaningfully explain why this or that happened on stage. When the nobles shouted: “Hey, someone!”, a man in an antique mask, who, apparently, was called Someone, ran out. For some reason, one of Petruchio’s servants wore a mustache sticking out in two tufts under his nose, like the artists who portray cats at children’s matinees, and in general, it seemed, he thought that he was a cat. Petruchio “rode” on a huge plaster horse without a head, with smoke coming out of its neck, and the horse’s head was lying separately. At that time, Katarina was struggling in a cage among the huge fragments of plaster angels. There was also a hollow stump of a woman’s torso, which sometimes someone wore on themselves like an absurd costume, and for a minute, I don’t remember why, a female skeleton with hair was brought onto the stage. It seemed as if the director had been given a chest of old things taken from the attic; he took out one thing or another from there and turned it over in front of him: maybe it will come in handy? And then he throws it away: it’s not useful. It was hard and sad to watch this for more than three hours straight.

At the end of November, “Golden Mask” will bring the second tranche of Alexandrinka: “Hamlet” by Valery Fokin, “Izotov” by Andrei Moguchy and “Uncle Vanya” by Andrei Shcherban. Let's hope.

Dina GODER