Two machine gunners

SounDrama Studio performed an anti-war performance at the Factory

Vladimir Pankov staged Yuri Klavdiev’s play “I am a machine gunner” in his SounDrama studio. For those who do not need to explain all the names in this phrase, this is intriguing news. However, Pankov started with a “new drama” - he played a lot in it as an actor, then he staged, moreover, one of his most famous and, in my opinion, his best performance, the documentary monologue of a provincial doctor “Doc.tor” - - also, strictly speaking, “new drama”. But then the director delved into the jungle of music, and here it no longer mattered what he staged, Tsvetaeva, Gogol, Shakespeare or Chekhov: the plots of his performances in recent years, as well as their structure, began to rely only on musical dramaturgy. The actor’s voice completely turned into an orchestral instrument, the text became completely indistinguishable, and the audience was immersed in the performance, as in a symphony concert, distinguishing themes and moods, but without delving into “who is uncle to whom,” which, of course, had its costs .

It would be difficult to dissect Yuri Klavdiev's mad play in this way, and there is no need. This story, in which there are two heroes - a modern “brother”, a participant in criminal showdowns, and his grandfather, who fought as a machine gunner on the Baltic coast, on Moonsund - was staged and played in Moscow more than once. The most famous was Irina Keruchenko’s one-woman show, where the excellent young actor Kirill Pletnev played both of them at once, the last two fighters, one of whom, during the Second World War, with a hole in his stomach, crawls into water boiling from bullets, and the second, today, was the last survivor “ boy" after a showdown with a clan of hostile "brothers". Pankov, unlike Keruchenko, populates a small play with many people. In addition to the main character, a “bull” in a black office suit, played by Alexey Chernykh, and his grandfather (Andrey Zavodyuk), there is also a certain generalized woman - a grandmother, a mother, a nurse, and many other characters who constantly change their identities. Friends in the same black suits as the hero, who went with him to relax at the camp site, from time to time put on rubber masks of Putin, Obama and Sarkozy and jump out from the proscenium onto the red velvet political stands, which are built like an amphitheater directly opposite the amphitheater with the public. Women are also in office suits, sometimes they shout into microphones in the stands and jump around in masks like Yulia Tymoshenko or Angela Merkel, and sometimes, putting on protective uniforms, they turn into soldiers or suicide bombers, aiming rifles with laser sights right at the audience.

Claudiev's play is somewhat confusing, although its general pathos, which combines disgust for war with romantic admiration for the “last hero,” the lone warrior, is completely clear. But this is not enough for Pankov, he wants to make a full-scale anti-war show, not only showing how senseless military slaughter resonates in peacetime criminal battles, but also branding all those who are to blame. Because of this, his performance turns into a loud-boiling stylistic mess. But what can you do: when the ashes of Klaas knock on the director’s heart, you can’t curb it, and every viewer can understand why Pankov suffered so much.

Monkeying in different languages ​​and grimacing, rubber-headed freak politicians came to the play “I am a Machine Gunner” straight from domestic propaganda brigades and the Western political theater of the 60s, as well as portraits of various military rulers from Napoleon made in the form of shooting range targets and Stalin to Saddam and Castro. Today this language is difficult to take seriously, but the story itself is a furious guy who, having taken off his suit and put on washed underpants, turns into a soldier and especially his grandfather, who in a quiet voice tells the disgusting truth about war and death (this is the best part in Klavdiev’s play, too, and in Pankov’s play) - touches many. In addition, the leitmotif of the performance becomes the hysterical “Hotel California”, which can also be considered a song about death; It is sung by everyone in turn, in the finale even accompanied by balalaikas (Pankov pays tribute to the genre of sound drama he created), and the bows are accompanied by a classic performance by the Eagles. This music, together with the pressure of the action itself, together create the same drive that always so captivates young fans of the SounDrama studio, who fill to capacity the new theater hall in one of the workshops of the “Factory Project”. Cold, bare, with holes, walls made of sand-lime brick, a echoing unheated factory corridor instead of a foyer - all this works to the left, screaming protest intonation of the performance. And even souvenirs like a program, stuffed like a crumpled piece of paper into a small duffel bag, seem superfluous.

Dina GODER