I can't spell it: Igor Mirkurbanov mixed Gogol with Lynch
Igor Mirkurbanov called his performance pretentiously and intriguingly: "Gogolliad". This is a collage based on the works of Nikolai Vasilyevich "The Inspector", "Nose", "Portrait", "Dead Souls", "Notes of a madman", "Viy". The action has been transferred to the present day, Gogol's characters resemble both Neo from The Matrix and Grigory Leps. Izvestia visited the premiere at Lenkom and tried to unravel the director's idea.
The play is based on "The Inspector General", "The Nose", "Notes of a Madman" and "Dead Souls"
The creators of the play "Gogolliade" immediately warn the audience that this is a production "based on motives" and we must prepare for the experiment. Igor Mirkurbanov's sources of inspiration include "The Inspector General", "The Nose", "Notes of a Madman", and "Dead Souls".
— I was interested in the last period of Nikolai Vasilyevich's life, connected with his sacredness, with religiosity, with what Belinsky accused him of in correspondence, — says Igor Mirkurbanov. — Liberalism, melancholy… Therefore, all the themes and objects that will appear in the dramatization are not accidental, but are related to the confessional period.
According to the director, he did not run around the theater and did not beg the management to allow him to stage Lenkom. When Mirkurbanov worked in Israel, he made several performances there and became quite familiar with the profession of director. Therefore, Mark Varshaver, who was still the director of the theater at that time, invited him to direct in Mark Zakharov's Lenkom. Now Varshaver, already in the status of the theater's president, accepted work while sitting in the auditorium.
The stage was covered with a curtain in the form of huge blinds. As soon as the lights in the hall went out, the captions appeared on this curtain: "The inspector will personally visit everyone and arrange a complete inventory. In fact, he's been here for a long time and lives somewhere nearby in an incognito hotel..." The projector brought to the curtain the first shots of Stanley Kubrick's horror film "The Shining" starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.
A ray of light picked out the figure of a man in a top hat to the right of the curtain. There was another gentleman in a cape and headdress standing in the left wing. They addressed each other by their first names — Sasha, Nikolai. And they were teasing at the same time. One told the other how three monuments had been erected to him, the other complained about the price of tickets to the museum named after him. The blues. It is not written. There are no plots. In my head in the morning only: "I'll ask ash..." But Sasha thinks that Virgil has already done this. Light dance music is playing.
When the curtain rises, it's as if the audience is entering a secret rendezvous place of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. The stage is framed by red velvet. There are curvy ladies and gentlemen on the podium with their backs to the audience. In the foreground is a carved sofa with leather upholstery. A pleasant gentleman in a suit and bow tie is sitting on it. This is Pavel Ivanovich Poprishchin, an art critic, philologist, translator from the Hittite and Hurrian epic of Gilgamesh, philanthropist, aesthete, mayor of NN-ska.
The theater space begins to come alive with the first notes: the performance is full of music. Ivan Rysin, remembered by the public for his role as Mozart in Alexei Frandetti's musical play "Pushkin Cabaret", plays Homa Brutus, director of the NN District Theater, in this production. He performs the leading roles in "Gogolliad".
"If Gogol originally had a Mayor in the Inspector General, now he is the Mayor of NN, a cultured man," explains Pavel Kapitonov, the performer of this role.
There is no need to look for textbook characters in the characters of the play. There are only hints of them and, as the directors like to say, a new reading of the classics. And the characters in the play hint at our contemporaries: Agatha Martyce (Alyona Mitroshina), Aglaya Carnival (Victoria Protsenko), Natalia Svist (Katerina Kuchma), Bob and Dob Chinsky (Kirill Krupov), Baron Maygel (Nikita Ovsyannikov), Aida Poprishchina (Maria Antipp). And Grisha Nos (Sergey Piotrovsky) and his concert director Sashka Ibis (Alexey Skuratov) are no longer even a hint, so when "A Glass of Vodka" is performed, no one is surprised. And the chanson star in the play The Impostor, he is also the Grand Inquisitor, the main one at the court of Osiris, where the souls of the dead are weighed. Outwardly, he resembles Neo from the blockbuster "The Matrix" by the Wachowski brothers, and at some point the characters in the production call him The One. Who is That One? After an hour of watching the play, you realize that this is Khlestakov, who was mistaken in NN for the auditor.
— The theme of our performance is a person's choice before the inevitable, — said Sergey Piotrovsky. — If they tell me today that I'm going to die tomorrow, how will I spend today? The search for God inside each person is not "somewhere", he is inside each of us.
The play "Gogolliad" — success or failure?
The audience received the performance differently. Some laughed, comparing what was happening with Kharms. Others noted that the star of Bogomolov's plays, especially "The Musketeers", "Karamazov" and "Novaya Optimisticheskaya", decided to surpass the teacher and do the same, only to have everything even more. Someone was frankly bored and, for example, demonstratively looked at the Atlanteans who towered over the hall in the left and right wings. Someone quipped quite loudly that some malefactor had cut Gogol's volumes into strips and woven a couple of screenplays into them. But the puzzle didn't work out in the end.
Leaving the theater, the audience was furiously discussing the "Gogol Olympiad". We agreed that there was still more of "Notes of a Madman" in the play. Someone was noisily reporting that what a good pair of sunglasses Neo was wearing, he was the One. We need to buy the same ones. Mirkurbanov probably achieved exactly the same effect he had hoped for: the variety of meanings and texts on stage led to a variety of opinions, even if Gogol was slightly less on stage than everyone expected.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
