Where the wire is prickly

"Five evenings" in Lenkom: what Alexander Volodin did not speak

Andrey Sokolov as Ilyin (right) and Alexander Sirin in the role of Timofeev (left) in the play "Five evenings"

The snow blizzard in the black doorway of the door, mournful figures in the Zekovsky quilted jackets froze under the snow. Figures from the other world, from the fact that on the other side of life, love, happiness. In Volodin, in the play, the camp topic is given a hint: he was in the north, worked as a driver, disappeared, dissolved after the front - maybe the camp, or maybe not. In the late 50s, this topic was a subtle dotted line. In Lenkom, director Andrei Prikotenko dotted turned into a thick fat line separating that gloomy camp world from this - light, fresh, filled with sounds and ironed with white tablecloths.

With a broken ridge

The main roles are played by actors who have never previously touched such roles: Olesya Zheleznyak, endowed with a bright comic gift, a real theatrical clowness, and Andrei Sokolov is a former playboy from the “little faith”, an aged, who had lost his former victorious charm. His Ilyin is loaded, baggy, fussy, wears the clothes of a friend Timofeev, in his hands he has a noticeable wooden suitcase, with which they usually return “from there”. He speaks with a hasty folder, laughs with an unnatural laughter, there are almost no teeth, and those that are, sparkle with grayish iron, on the chest - Stalin's profile. Ilyin is all saturated with fear, constantly tense, as if waiting for a trick, shout, blow. At night he dreams of a camp. Snow blizzard, roll call, twin with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his hoarse growl: “Ilyin, b ** d, to exit!”

Meeting with Tamara - as a return to the house, to comfort, to a cooing radiolet on the wall, soft woolen socks, hot potatoes in the uniform, the smell of fresh linen and spring mimosa in a bank. To curl up with a kalachik, bury your head into the female knees and skip at her at hand, smelling of household soap and “red Moscow” ...

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Apparently, this time has come - not just to set up accents, but also to beat every thought to their place. So as not to tear off

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Andrei Sokolov chose an incredibly difficult task - to abandon all the stereotypes associated with this role, and there are already many of them, from Efim Kopelan in the legendary BDT performance to Stanislav Lyubshin in the no less legendary film by Nikita Mikhalkov. You can add to them the two of today's - Igor Gordin from the play “Fomenko Workshop” and Sergey Garmash from “Contemporary”. Everything is very different, but everything is men. Lonely, broken, but not bent, endowed by naturally breathtaking charisma, which attracts women like butterflies. Sokolov, however, plays a crushed man, with a broken ridge, who has some kind of curve, tortured, and rhyme lines give a smile, and rhyme lines are given by neopotal vulgarity. He forgot how to flirt, how to talk with children, how to drink and bite beautifully. And everything is falling from ugly frostbitten hands.

Sokolov is not yet too free in this drawing, replaying, too much fond of external details. But this is the risk that the actor and the director themselves took on: such a version of the hero can be played only at complete revelation, full of self -disclosure.

Recollection of feelings

Olesya Zheleznyak is not much easier: behind her stretches a train of comedic roles. Almost for the first time we see her in a real tragic role, and she plays bravely and piercingly. Having hungry for male warmth, exhausted by work and loneliness, not very beautiful, rude and unlucky, her heroine gives all the unspent tenderness to her nephew, who replaced her both her family, love, and motherhood. The meeting with Ilyin finds her by surprise: everything that happens between a man and a woman has long remained on the other side of life. And only the heart bursts out and breathing causes from crazy pity for this person.

Filled by Ilyin’s camp past, the authors slightly lost their sense of proportion: too many prison signs were put on the stage - two -story bunks in the Tamara room, and vodka from the throat, and obsessive visions from the blizzard. Volodin is too thin and fragile for such thick heavy metaphors, destroying the play, depriving it of air, inner freedom. And the finale looks at all a banal meaningful: Tamara takes off his camp, worn out linen from Ilyin, washes a sponge and puts a pure white shirt on him. It is good that they did not think of washing the profile of Stalin “on the left chest” with this sponge.

It is embarrassed when foreign texts, foreign scenes burst into the fabric of the Volodinsky play: Slavik, who shouting in the face of Ilyin’s persons of the classmate “Brodsky”, the saleswoman Zoya, arranging striptease in a store warehouse. Apparently, this time has come - not just to place accents, but also to beat every thought to their place. Screw like a stool. So as not to tear off. That is why the code, conceived as a bow to all those who went through the Hell of the Gulag, does not give birth in the hall of the emotions that the authors counted on. Photos of the elderly with a sorrow hidden in their eyes, looking at us from the brick wall of the stage, are valuable on their own, but no internal connection with the heroes of the play arises. Because the old people are real.

Photo: Mikhail Gutherman