A pound of pain to eat: Agureeva and Bashmet hosted a Chekhov feast
Five pounds of love, 22 misfortunes, 33 tantrums — this is the arithmetic of the new play by director and actress Polina Agureeva in the Workshop of Peter Fomenko, the premiere days of which took place on February 6 and 7 on the New Stage of the theater. After going through 12 volumes of Anton Chekhov's literary legacy, Agureeva sat two dozen characters at one table, driven by common problems and consumed by longing. This feast features the entire Fomenko school with its attention to people, the pain of discrepancies, and the ability to talk about the tragic through the comic, without consolation and false hopes. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
The tablecloth of human destinies
Polina Agureeva, the successor of the Fomenko school, is creating a play for the third time in conjunction with the Yuri Bashmet Winter International Art Festival, which is taking place in Moscow for the seventh time. Now she invited the audience to join an amazing feast, where various characters from the works of one of the main playwrights of the Russian theater gathered. The characters talk about their fears, worries and, of course, about love. Agureeva's play, in which the actress played one of the roles, is called "About love (five pounds of love, 22 misfortunes, 33 tantrums)." But behind this almost mathematical characteristic lies the whole depth of the Russian soul.
Chekhov called his lyrics comedies, but whenever the viewer encounters his characters, it turns out that there is little funny in them. Humor is not here for entertainment, but for awareness of pain, tragedy is not for crying, but for understanding the absurdity of one's own life. In Agureeva's production, this leitmotif sounds especially acute. Chekhov's characters love casually, tangentially, and it is in this discrepancy that they resemble us contemporaries, who are just as desperate for happiness, but more often find a contradiction between what they want and what is real.
This feeling arises even before the first remark. Instead of the usual horizontal, set designer Maria Mitrofanova tilts the space at an alarming angle. A huge dining table meanders along its entire length. It is covered with a multi-meter tablecloth and becomes a kind of chronicle of the events experienced, in which there is a place for both light and dark spots. Thus, the table seems to hover over the audience and is about to collapse on them. Holes can be seen in the plank floor, and tall screens with patterned glass refer to Chekhov's own country terrace in Yalta.
A vinaigrette of characters
Of the 12 volumes of the playwright's works, Polina Agureeva chose the most significant, poignant and characteristic.
— There is a plot in our play. But it is compiled from all 12 volumes of Chekhov, because he always has a conditional husband and wife, to whom guests endlessly gather for lunch. They are from many of Chekhov's plays," said Polina Agureeva.
The Lebedev couple (Karen Badalov and Galina Kashkovskaya) from Ivanov, their daughter Shurochka (Alexandra Keselman) and Ivanov himself (Rustem Yuskaev) are also present at this feast; there are also characters from Uncle Vanya: Serebryakova (Polina Agureeva), Astrov (Denis Avramov) and Voynitsky (Mikhail Krylov).; images from the playwright's first play "Fatherlessness" — General Voynitseva (Natalia Kurdyubova), teacher Platonov (Ilya Shakunov), his wife Shura (Natalia Martynova); and even governess Charlotte Ivanovna (Elena Voronchikhina) from "The Cherry Orchard", which Chekhov called the best role in this play.
At the same time, as toasts — in a free and hilarious retelling — the plots of other plays by the author sound. However, when the feast lasts for more than one hour, some details of the story keep flying out of the narrative: in one case, "there was some kind of bird," in another, "some kind of grandfather died." An attentive viewer can easily recognize both "The Seagull" and "The Cherry Orchard" in these verbal puzzles.
The guides of the variety of destinies are the Pantelei guides (Alexey Vertkov/ Stepan Pyankov) and Kiriukha (Anatoly Antsiferov) from "The Steppe", as well as Matvey (Vladimir Toptsov), who suffered in the story "Murder" for the true faith.
The table in the production is not only the main decoration, but also its metaphor. We are used to putting everything that happens in life on the general "festive" cover, but even after less than three hours, as long as the action lasts, the table remains empty, as if embodying the inner inconsistency of each character.
The Jewish Orchestra by Yuri Bashmet
The chamber ensemble "Soloists of Moscow" under the direction of Yuri Bashmet turns out to be an independent participant in the performance. The Lebedevs allegedly hired the musicians, who are described as a "Jewish orchestra" for a dinner party. But they hired someone, but there's nothing to pay with. Meanwhile, it is thanks to the orchestra and the music of composer Valery Voronov, written specifically for this performance, that Agureeva's fictional plot sounds like an intermittent symphony of human feelings: sometimes lyrical, sometimes sinister, sometimes beating to the rhythm of an inexorable heart searching for love.
— I wanted to take all Chekhov's themes: love, its true dimension, why his characters don't come to harmony, why everything ends badly. I took typical situations from Chekhov, because, as it seems to me, they reflect his worldview, — Polina Agureeva noted.
Moscow Soloists Chamber Ensemble under the direction of conductor Yuri Bashmet before the performance of "About Love" directed by Polina Agureeva
Today, these texts continue to sound like a diagnosis of an era where every person has their own five pounds of happiness, 22 misfortunes and 33 tantrums.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
