Glamor and discourse

Participation in the premiere of Gogolevskaya “Marriage” at the Theater of Nations Ksenia Anatolyevna Sobchak, who played the episodic role of Swach Fekla Ivanovna, was pronounced by all conceivable and unthinkable media - “Couriers, couriers, couriers ... thirty -five thousand couriers!”. So the media work. But this time the journalists got into the apple: the presence of Sobchak, an unprofessional actress in the play, is almost more important than the rest of the casting details - and this is despite the fact that Maxim Vitorgan (subcolorine), Anna Ukolova (Agafya Tikhonovna) and Vitaliy Khaev (Kochkarev), are busy in the performance.

We will try to reconstruct the director’s logic. Philip Grigoryan re -read Gogol’s comedy and reasonably decided that they were not married so now. And then he remembered that they were still married-but not in real life, but on TV. The bride is offered to choose between unfamiliar men, the organizer of the meeting receives money-what is not a current show?

So, the profession of matchmakers is in demand only on television, and Grigoryan needed a TV presenter with similar experience for this role, ideally - a star. If this very star also treats its own image with irony, it is good if she also understands something in the actual theater, nothing better cannot be invented at all.

The “marriage” of Philip Grigoryan can be considered as a critical comprehension of reality in which the modern Russian viewer lives.

One way or another, paradoxically, the material of the classical play itself pushed the director to think about the most acute topic of television as the only source of knowledge about the world for the vast majority of today's Russians. In other words, Grigoryan’s “marriage” can be considered as a critical understanding of reality in which the modern Russian viewer lives. The premiere of the Theater of Nations will probably divide the fate of a cash hit with a double bottom with the “perfect husband” of Konstantin Bogomolov-the most famous performance about the domestic pop culture: gullible viewers will go “to Sobchak”, not suspecting that Grigoryan is using the media face in the ironic context, just like Bogomolov traverse is traveled by the rocker-oriented oriented oriented oriented Chanson.

However, unlike the same Bogomolov, the authors of the new “marriage” do not violate the logic of a textbook play, practically do not edit it-because of which the action, what to say, is at times ascertains. The semantic field, as often happens in the productions of Grigoryan, who, according to the tradition of acting as a director and a scenograph of the performance, arises primarily due to visual decisions.

Glamor and war - these are two whales of modern television reality, on which the “marriage” of Philip Grigoryan rests. A suction-sweet picture from the posters-fifty shades of pink-gives an exhaustive idea of ​​the aesthetics of the performance. Only a little too Much , and even a cheap snack, where the first meeting of Agafya Tikhonovna with the grooms takes place, looks more luxurious than he should, we still live in Russia; Griles on the grill would have been enough to eat one single small village.

Vitorgan in a thick makeup looks like a star of pops; Interiors embody ideas about the beautiful owners of the middle hand of the night club. Digital landscapes in the window are changing their hands, cardboard vehicles and live-sized buses go from the backstage: subcolorine, in a cold, idly traveling around Moscow at the beginning of the performance, is a perfect masterpiece of theatrical equipment.

However, in this world of unbridled consumption, familiar to our compatriots only by television, the war no, no, and will show its non-female face. In the most literal sense: all grooms, rivals of Podkolesin, are soldiers to one degree or another. Even a sailor Zhevakin, a decrepit old man in a suit either a divers or an astronaut, at the most crucial moment of matchmaking is with orders on his chest. The official of the ovary became the obese chief of riot police in the body armor; It is worth unfastening it - and red intestines will fall out of the belly. The green-legged officer Anumchkin arrives at Agafya Tikhonovna exactly like a Balaban hero-in a galvanized coffin: "The groom arrived."

In a spectacular epilogue, the triumph is released, as expected, not at all a wife -like subclesin, but the ovarian police captain. From the animated insert, we learn that the groom's jump was suicide in the window - Agafya Tikhonovna’s apartment is located at least on the hundredth floor. And then, presumably, we are shown the consequences of this strange death: riot police, autosak, bride and her homes are faced with a face, a fire is blazing behind, a newly -made groom in a cap and armor -wrapping a bouquet gives a bouquet - but it is not in a hurry to free her. “Marriage” unexpectedly turned out to be, perhaps, the most politicized performance of Grigoryan: his heroes live in a society amazed by the epidemic of militarism, in the company of legitimate violence, in a society that was carefully accustomed to aggression between the talk show about matchmaking.