Evacuation train named after Bruegel

Friedrich Gorenstein and Ekaterina Polovtseva in the "House with a Turret" on the stage of the RAMT

Small stage, 1 hour 35 minutes. Great production team. 30-year-old director Yekaterina Polovtseva is a student of Sergei Zhenovach, who absorbed the dignity and humanity of his school, the knowledge that the theater is in the details, the ability to thoughtfully read real prose. Polovtseva's most famous performance today is Autumn Sonata at Sovremennik with Marina Neelova and Alena Babenko. And in the "House with a turret" Maxim Kerin plays the main role. For the role of Charlie in Yuri Grymov's play "Flowers for Algernon", the young actor in 2015 received the Stanislavsky Prize in the "Perspective" nomination and "Crystal Turandot" in the "Debut" nomination.

The House with a Turret is based on an autobiographical story by Friedrich Gorenstein, the only text that Gorenstein managed to publish in the USSR before emigrating. Gorenstein had a strange and rather sad creative fate: he was considered a very great writer by Yuri Trifonov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Pyotr Fomenko - but Gorenstein's bitterest prose has not been read by the general public to this day. According to his scripts, "Solaris" and "Slave of Love" were staged - but the films were released on the screen without the name of the disgraced screenwriter in the credits. But in the theater, the scale of Gorenstein opens up to a thoughtful spectator: in the early 1990s, P.N. 2015 - "Volemir" by Yevgeny Kamenkovich in the "Workshop of Pyotr Fomenko", now - "House with a Turret" by Polovtseva.

...A photo studio of the 1960s: the poor comfort of the Soviet retro, wild rosemary in old damasks, developers-fixers-frames worthy of the Polytechnic Museum, cheerful nonsense of the radio. A tall and cheerful photographer is an exemplary thaw youth, his clients are prosperous Soviet citizens. Why does his consciousness, along with action, slip away into the darkness of the evacuation train of 1942, in which the typhoid Mother (Maria Ryshchenkova) is delirious — until she and her son are dropped off at a remote station?

The clients of the photo studio turn into people of 1942: old women selling fish, hungry old men in pince-nez and women's knitted sweaters almost to the point of losing their human appearance, well-fed wives of employees of the "organs", cast-iron-drunk front-line invalids, distraught from lack of sleep, doctors of the district hospital with yellow spots on the only and dilapidated dressing gown. The people of 1942 turn into the characters of Bosch and Brueghel the Elder: the small stage of the RAMT is filled to the brim with misfortune, the winter wind, gnawed to the bone by the poverty of war, where every spoonful of hospital porridge counts; where the dying groan and the living crowd around the carriage with the bundles of their last possessions; where they steal a piece of bread at night - and take the orphaned Boy under the care of the whole car.

This injury is nationwide, like Victory. It cannot be outlived by the Photographer (and by no one, according to Gorenstein). But through the masks of the blind men and ravens, through the metaphysical ruin to the last thread, in which everyone lives, not thinking of another fate for themselves, human faces again and again appear in the crowd.

This is what the performance is about - pure, precise, phantasmagoric. The world of 1942 is twisted, mutilated to the limit, as if twisted and melted in the explosion. And in it shines indestructible humanity...