Alternative polymers

The most tourist appearance of Tobolsk recalls that the hometown of the writer Ershov, the artist of Perov and Chemist Mendeleev was always the city of exiles: the white -stone state ward as part of the only Siberian Kremlin was built by exiled Swedes, and a very unexpected brick church - Poles with Lithuanians. An important prison topic for the city will echo in the documentary play by Marina Krapivina - one of the heroes will turn out to be a former zek, the other will share a memory of a school where 17 out of 18 guys “were ready to be in the zone at least tomorrow”.

In the XIX century, the old capital of Siberia was aloof from the new trade routes - and finally became the periphery when the Trans -Siberian Railway was laid through the neighboring Tyumen. Today Tobolsk is a town with a population of slightly less than one hundred thousand, three hours driving to the nearest airport in Tyumen. So the “Board of Honor” is the very case when the production of Verbatim literally tells about your neighbor: as it turned out at the discussion of the performance, some spectators personally know people who agreed to become donors of the text.

The pathos of the performance is in attention to any individuality, to any arbitrarily chosen atom of the polymer city.

What else do you need to know about Tobolsk? It was here that the Sybur petrochemical giant was registered, which owns a city -forming chemical plant. The company’s participation in urban life, as they say, cannot be overestimated. “We go to Tobolsk, through one building - this is built by a plant,” says the heroine of the project, initiated and supported, like other regional laboratories of the Territory festival, all the same Sibur.

Tobolsk - the seventh city participating in the educational program "Territory" and "Sibura". Two teams - the Tobolsk drama theater named after Ershov and the Free Youth Theater (SMT) - mastered the technique of verbatim under the leadership of the capital's experts: the playwright Marina Krapivina, director and teacher Dmitry Brusnikin, his students Sergei Shchedrin and Anastasia Great. The artists recorded monologues of the artist, the Bayanist, the Yoga instructor, the girl in the wheelchair, the Mendeleev fan and two dozen citizens.

Intermediate result of the work - a sketch of the documentary setting “Tobolsk. Board of Honor ” - showed in the Ershov Theater. Actors and spectators sitting with each other right on the stage, while the audience takes their places, energetic guys in helmets conduct safety precautions (this excerpt from Krapivina overheard on excursions on Sibur). In the monologue that opens the performance, an employee of the chemical plant describes the structure of polymers: it is impossible to get rid of the thought that this is not at all about chemical, but about social relations, about the structure of the city community.

Few people in the modern Russian theater know how to work with documentary material as interesting as Dmitry Brusnikin - and in the acting (you need to see how he plays the American farmer in the performance of Casimir Liske “ Black & Simpson ” ), and in his directorial mortgage. In the fresh project of Brusnikin “Before and after” shown on the last “Territory”, the young graduates of his workshop masterly copy prototypes, the elderly wards of the Artist Foundation, neither makeup nor computer graphics would have aged actors-children better. But it would be strange to expect that in a short period of rehearsals in Tobolsk, the director will reach the same mutual understanding with the troupe of the Ershov Theater and SMT: the Brusnikinites were engaged in verbatim from the first years of study, and for the Tobolians this technique was new. Therefore, in places the “Board of Honor” suffers from illustrativeness: other actors, as if without trusting the viewer, simplify living, unexplored characters, leave them two or three exaggerated characteristics, and this is the same as cutting with scissors a silhouette from a picture written in the SFUMUMO technique.

There were, however, and acting good luck and two quite brilliant performances. Evgeny Ponomarev, artist and part-time, the director of the Ershov Theater, a living everyday tone reproduces the story of a 50-year-old man about the poor childhood of his peers, about the former teenage fashion on the “thieves'” theme, about youth subcultures, nubied provincial depression. Glavrezh SMT Olga Solodova played a former shift, yearning for the extreme north and polar radiance: the heroine turned out to be characteristic, almost grotesque, but at the same time voluminous and touching.

The name "Board of Honor" involuntarily prompted the playwright one of the donors - an employee of the plant, mentioning that last year the company was posting on the stand of its photo: "When an employee is placed on the board of honor, well, it allows you to internally understand what the company needs. Well, what are you just working, right? " The pathos of the project is in attention to any individuality, to any arbitrarily chosen atom of the polymer city: the performance of the “territory” is a kind of alternative board of honor, the place where everyone deserved.