Theatrical attack

Siloviki and Cossacks took the stage

As an old-fashioned person, the author is not very fond of performances. Left behind life, like many of those who were born in the last millennium. Habits are established, tastes are formed.

For example, a performance, even if it is a documentary, should take place on a stage separated by a curtain from the auditorium. The curtain opens, the performers talk, the audience listens and occasionally applauds. Rotten tomatoes are not forbidden as an evaluation cue from the stalls. But if, in response, the artist grabs a gun hanging on the wall and opens aimed fire at the audience, then this will already be a performance. This, in my opinion, from a lack of culture. It is unacceptable.

However, even to a person who does not catch the innovative trends on the modern stage, it gradually becomes clear that performances are different. Thoughtful and relevant. Leaving the old-fashioned viewer indifferent and literally grabbing to the quick.

Take, for example, the well-known action of the Voina group called “In Memory of the Decembrists”, which was held not even in a theater, but in an arbitrarily chosen supermarket. There, if you remember, revolutionary-minded girls hanged living people, one of whom later turned out to be a gay and a Jew. For me, this was a complete disgrace, because living people, even in order to combat xenophobia, cannot be hanged.

But then our national leader stepped onto the stage (tribune), and the tasteless action immediately sparkled with fresh colors. His excited story about a effigy of a Jew, over which the future blasphemer and the Judeophobes who joined her, were mocked, will forever go down in the history of the theater. Such is the power of real performance!

One can say about the performance of the Swiss director Milo Rau at the Sakharov Center yesterday, March 3, even without seeing it: it was a far-fetched spectacle. Indeed, why recreate reality on stage if we have already seen this performance live - in the courtroom, for example? The intentional, naturalistic nature of the play was obvious to any spectator lagging behind the times. Exactly until the true artists took over the stage.

At first, the boring flow of the performance was enlivened by the appearance of the FMS employees, who immediately demanded an ausweiss from the director, and then it turned out that he had entered on the wrong visa to show us different plays. Therefore, the building of the Center was soon surrounded by the Cossacks, and this mass scene, contrary to the sluggish plan of the director, became the key one. The performance spilled out into the street, and from there again into the auditorium, where some of the lucky ones witnessed a stunning scene: the Orthodox actor Maxim Shevchenko convinced the Cossacks that there was no need to organize a pogrom in the theater. It was the culmination of the action, its complete apogee, after which a break was announced, and then the performance went on a worn-out track and was sadly played out to the end.

So I say: performance is different, but how to separate real art from sparkles and imitative tinsel? How should a modern play be staged so that it evokes a response from the most mossy retrogrades like the author of these lines? And where to recruit artists who can evoke genuine feelings not only among the common public, but also among sophisticated connoisseurs? And there they recruit where they came from for the performance - in the migration service, in law enforcement agencies and among those citizens who call themselves, say, Cossacks. Then success is guaranteed, and any Stanislavsky, wiping tears and blood from broken glasses, will exclaim: “I believe!”

Even the thought creeps in that the Swiss, who has become proficient in staging performances, personally organized and paid for this extras. Otherwise, where would they come from, officials, security officials and mummers onlookers, who had probably never heard of any Milo Rau before. And if so, then you need to take your hat off to the master. And if the Russian state itself took care of directing, then one cannot help but admire his artistic talents. Well, you need to be able to do this - put on such an unheard-of performance, covering yourself with unfading international fame.

The New Times published an interview with Milo Rau, artistic director of the Moscow Trials project