Theater of Children's Sadness

Joël Pomerat directed Pinocchio at Praktika

The last thing that can be said about the Joël Pomre Theater, with its disturbing plays and dark, introverted performances, is a theater for children. The strange Frenchman’s productions, starting with “The Merchants,” which the NET festival brought three years ago, and up to “This Child,” then staged at Praktika, in one way or another concerned children, but were never intended for them. And even “Little Red Riding Hood,” which came to the “Big Change” children’s festival a couple of years ago, was, frankly speaking, not a children’s play at all. What made the fairytale plot very modern was the story of a tired mother who had no time to visit her old grandmother, and the story of how a little girl met a rapist and wolf killer in the forest made adults shiver. And yet, the Praktika theater, realizing that having once bet on Pomera, had drawn a winning ticket, and turning to the French director for the second time, ordered him a children's production. And I was not mistaken.

Pomera again retells Carlo Collodi's tale in his own words, and again his story turns out to be frighteningly modern and very scary. But this is the fear that children love, because there is a way out of horror. Although, I must admit, the way out, as always with Pomer, is sad: the hero, having overcome all the obstacles, is very tired and does not seem at all as resounding and victorious as in the beginning. And when in the finale it turns out that the wooden man has become alive, you remember the words from “At the Bottom”: “They crushed a lot, that’s why it’s soft.”

The play has a narrator. He says that he was once blind and saw the world like this: the theater plunges into darkness, and then in the barely dissipated darkness we distinguish the rows of the audience, like a reflection of the auditorium. And among the dark human figures, the beam suddenly picks out terrible animal faces: monkey, donkey, wolf. And we shudder, as if it turned out that werewolves were sitting among us. And the narrator also says that the most important thing for him is not to lie, in life and theater to tell only the truth. And only then does he begin the story about a very lonely man who had so little to talk to that he went to talk to a tree every day. And when the wind knocked down the trunk, he worked for a very long time to carve a wooden boy, a son, from the stump of his former interlocutor.

Pinocchio, a boy with a whitened face and black lips, is played by series star Alisa Grebenshchikova. At first you shudder from her voice, ringing boastfully, as in “Pioneer Dawn,” but then it turns out that it doesn’t matter. We are told about a disgusting, self-confident, ungrateful, angry boy. And everything is clear: no matter how fate punishes Pinocchio, that’s what he needs. Because he was rude and heartless to his kind father. But when life begins to beat the wooden man, it suddenly turns out that the naive braggart with his stupid pride, which even in the face of murderers prevents him from admitting that the boy is poor, is terribly pitiful. And the ability to evoke sympathy for someone who is in trouble, no matter how unpleasant he was before, is worth a lot. For behind it lies the ability to forgive. And in the play, it is very important to have confidence that a person can change and even the nastiest character should not be given up.

Some edifying intonation migrated from Collodi’s fairy tale to Pomera’s performance. But for some reason she doesn't irritate me. Perhaps this is because all the misadventures that gradually led the hero to become an obedient boy end with the fact that, having found himself with his father in the belly of a sea monster, the matured hero still acts in his own way - and this gives the heroes freedom. And the old father thanks his son for being disobedient.

There are only four actors in Pinocchio. Dmitry Gotsdiner (narrator), Svetlana Kamynina (fairy), Oleg Komarov (father) change roles one after another, appearing as swindlers, classmates, or creepy killers in white suits with caps, like Ku Klux Klansmen. In an unreal, ghostly action that takes place as if behind milky glass, you can’t always tell who is who. Sometimes people are seen as shadows, and fairy-tale magic seems to be the flickering of distant, muddy lights. Like Pomera’s previous quiet performances, always performed in diffused semi-darkness, “Pinocchio” is similar to the muttering of an autistic child sitting in the corner - the same repeating motifs and internal tension, it is also disturbing, fascinating and does not let go. But in this performance there is hope, there is a quiet, tired happiness of a father and son who have found each other, who will no longer be alone. Which is very important for the children who will come to see Pinocchio.

Once upon a time, in contrast to the old Soviet definition of children's theater as a “theater of children's joy,” director Anatoly Praudin put forward the idea of ​​a “theater of children's sorrow.” Then this endeavor in St. Petersburg ended in failure, the director lost the theater, but it seems that now Joël Pomerat is following the same path. He leads the little viewer (and “Pinocchio,” in my opinion, should be shown to children starting from primary school age) through sadness, anxiety and fear to an understanding of something very important, which, of course, you won’t learn about while having fun at children’s matinees .

Dina GODER