George Zheno: It is strange to put Shakespeare when modernity is so rich in plots

The director of the Fourth Theater in the International Memorial is a ban on directorial ambitions, responsibility to memory and difficulties in working with historical material

- “The Fourth Theater” in the “International Memorial” is the long -awaited development of the topic of the documentary theater at the new -income level. Provincial theaters' props monitor what is happening in the country and want to participate in protests. People in restaurant wagons in full voice scold the government-a year ago it was impossible to imagine. With memory and archives you need to work right now. The causes of what is happening is finally interested in everyone. During my studies in GITIS, in the late 1990s, a group of playwrights came to our course and offered to make performances in the documentary technique of Verbatim (literally). This was by the way, since I even lived with a sensation: it is strange to put Shakespeare when modernity is so rich in plots. For two years we interviewed 18-year-old soldiers returning from Chechnya, and made the play "Tseutnot".

The action unfolded in the "zone" between the past and the future - a rehabilitation center for soldiers. This project became my diploma performance in GITIS and one of the first performances of theater.doc. The Verbatim technique and the “here and now” approach for 10 years have been the most important for me in the Russian theater.

Over time, acute topics related to modernity did not become less, but the understanding was born that not everything can be done by the “here and now” approach. The “load of silence”, who was suggested to me to make the head of the cultural programs of the Goethe-Institute of Wolf Iro, became a very personal, miraculous work with memory. The project became the directorial debut of Mikhail Kaluga and one of the first projects of the theater. Joseph Boyce in the Sakharov Center.

The theater project “The Cargo of Silence” is based on the book of the Israeli psychologist Dana Bar-ON, dedicated to the study of memory and guilt. Dan Bar-O (1938-2008) was born in a family of German Jews, who managed to leave Germany in the mid-30s. In 1985, he began a unique study of the moral and psychological influence of the Holocaust. The materials of this study-an interview that Bar-O took from the children who grew up in the Nazi families were published in the book “The Cargo of Silence: Meetings with the Children of the Third Reich” (1989). It was these interviews that became the basis for the performance.

It became clear: in order to make performances about the present, we must turn to the past, the causes of totalitarianism in the past. Reality must be comprehended by historical material. Therefore, for example, the play “The Fourth Theater” “The Court of Brodsky” Evgenia Berkovich, in which the trial of the poet is patronized with school persecution by the teacher and students of the appearance of the weak and the other, will go in the premises of the “Memorial” regularly. What is totalitarianism at school, I knew from personal experience. Of course, not one thing is addressed to me to interpret and stage modern Russian problems and their origins. We are a whole team. But I turned out to be one of the most susceptible due to personal circumstances. The fact is that at the age of 17 I learned that my grandfather on her paternal line was a senior SS, and my mother’s grandfather was a Jew who transferred Chekhov into German. All relatives on this line died in Aushwitz. About the history of the family, I staged the play “I, Anna and Helga”, where I combined the diaries of Anna Frank, Helgi Goebbels and my own story. In the USSR, there are also many families from the repressed and servants of the Stalin regime. The journalist Mikhail Kaluzhsky and an employee of Memorial Alexander Polivanov will make a performance about such a family in the Sakharov Center.

We must look and hope for understanding. In June, trial readers were carried out, and some work failed, for example, the techniques of actionism are difficult to embody in the documentary archival theater, and are difficult for the audience perception. This is a lesson. But it would be strange to establish an uninterrupted production of successful performances. Do we limit ourselves in working with the document, are we entering a document to the cult? No. Everything serves the theater. And at the same time, a documentary theater is a zone of responsibility. Many texts from the archive of the Memorial concern the memory of living people, we have no right to play their feelings. There is no moral opportunity to make a theater out of their fate - do you understand the ethical complexity of our artistic tasks? Having made an eighteen hour in the Theater.Doc, we called the mother of Sergei Magnitsky. To make a performance that offended her would be scary. Therefore, the question is for us: "Why art?" - painful and sharp. The reaction of people involved in the event for us today is more important than an artistic result. So - you need to work with them in close contact. The directorial ambitions are locked in a dark closet. The truth is pure. At the opening of the Fourth Theater, Oksana Mysina read a letter to a woman whose husband was shot, but she believed that Stalin was not to blame. Such a striking example of Brainwashing could only be spoiled by directing.

The Auction of Theater Ideas was the working name of our program. We are ready to give projects to those theaters who are interested in our material. Let the Moscow Art Theater come, “contemporary” come, work in archives, work with our young directors. We hope that schoolchildren will be brought to our performances. In the Sakharov Center, schoolchildren watch “I, Anna and Helga”, after we speak with them, and I see that children do not know the history of their own country. Therefore, the social responsibility of the theater is so important.

I would like to make the theater in the Memorial a controversial, living place where people acutely react to profanity of ideas and honestly discuss its first symptoms. I would like the participants in the common cause to burn for a long time, as they burn now, it depends on whether the past will open to us. We will lead the theater project collectively. For me, this is the most modern approach to the creation of an antitotalitarian theater.

It doesn’t matter that many people of the theater that I proposed to participate were refused, even sometimes reacted aggressively to the proposal of a new theater topic, and one successful theater figure honestly blurted out: “George, this is very difficult!” Difficult. But many refusing will come later, and we will work. Avoiding the high self -awareness involved in the great cause. For authors and for spectators, the theater in archives is not a story for the lazy.