I walked the streets: crocodiles and bureaucrats on Moscow stages
Witty games with classics, theater within a theater, old plays about the main thing and novelties of foreign drama — this is the picture of what was happening on the capital's stage in February. The most interesting premieres are in Vlad Vasyukhin's review.
"About love (5 pounds of love, 22 misfortunes, 33 tantrums)"
Pyotr Fomenko's Workshop in conjunction with the Winter International Art Festival
The very first remark — about the famous Jewish orchestra, which "was hired, but there is nothing to pay for" — makes it clear that in the next three hours it will be noisy, bustling, fun and very sad. However, as is almost always the case with Chekhov, who for some reason called his dramas comedies... From the title, and even more so from the list of actors, it is easy to guess that the audience is waiting for a bizarre collage of Chekhov's plays, novels and short stories. At the same time, some textbook plots will be given in a concise retelling. Around a long curved table that crosses the entire stage (artist Maria Mitrofanova), passions will boil, and the characters will suffer from love, loneliness and longing.
Director and actress Polina Agureeva and actor Denis Avramov in a scene from the play "About Love (5 Pounds of Love, 22 Misfortunes, 33 tantrums)" during the pre-premiere screening on the main stage of the P.N. Fomenko Workshop Theater
An important co—author of the classic is the modern composer Vladimir Voronov, who wrote, in his own words, "both rather primitive, simple music and highly virtuosic" specifically for the energetic tragifarse.
This musical and dramatic performance is the fourth in a row, staged by Polina Agureeva in collaboration with the Winter Arts Festival, led by Yuri Bashmet, and with the direct participation of the maestro himself and the Moscow Soloists Chamber Ensemble. The premiere took place in February as part of the festival program — first in the capital, then in Sochi, and now the play is included in the repertoire of the Fomenkovites. In addition to the leading artists of this beloved and critically acclaimed troupe — Karen Badalov, Natalia Kurdyubova, Galina Kashkovskaya, Thomas Motskus, Rustem Yuskaev and others — guest stars Ilya Shakunov and Alexey Vertkov take the stage. The director also found a role — Agureeva plays the beautiful Elena Andreevna from Uncle Vanya in her play.
"Don Quixote"
Moscow Art Theater named after Chekhov
The Art Theater, with which Mikhail Bulgakov had a difficult and bitter relationship a hundred years ago (which is worth his phrase "The theater ate me clean"), now pays tribute to an outstanding writer, one of its main authors. After the recent premiere of The Cabal of Saints, another Bulgakov play with a difficult fate, Don Quixote, was released on the main stage of the Moscow Art Theater, timed to coincide with the 135th anniversary of the playwright. And although the directors, the cast, and the presentation of the material are different, we can say that there is a kind of dilogy.
Actors Ilya Kozyrev and Ivan Volkov in the play "Don Quixote" during the pre-premiere screening at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater
Nikolai Roshchin moved the action to 1938, to a certain Soviet theater, where the director, an experimenter and a formalist rehearses the staging of the novel by Cervantes. The director supplemented the performance with materials from that era — quotes from Meyerhold and transcripts of party meetings, arguments about creative freedom. The director (the new star of the Moscow Art Theater, 23-year—old Ilya Kozyrev) is both an actor playing the role of Don Quixote, and the second actor and Sancho Panza is played by Ivan Volkov. Several roles, including the wordless crocodile, were given to Alexei Varushchenko. There are also eight first—class actresses in the team, representing both the troupe of that imaginary theater and the characters of Cervantes - Irina Pegova, Vera Kharybina, Yanina Kolesnichenko, Yulia Chebakova, Polina Romanova and others.
Actress Irina Pegova in the play "Don Quixote" during the pre-premiere screening at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater
The spectacle is interesting, complex and multilayered: the stage is equipped with grandiose mechanisms, mobile dressing rooms, a huge wooden horse, and a screen on which a Spanish short film will be shown to the public. The set design (which, like the staging, Roshchin did himself) is complemented by lighting effects. Redundancy is perhaps the main complaint about this large—scale blockbuster in every sense.
"Dumb artist"
The space "Inside"
84-year-old Kama Ginkas, an elder of the director's workshop, a People's Artist of Russia, one might say, a living classic, unexpectedly staged a play in one of the most popular theater basements in Moscow, where it is more common to see the work of debutants and experimentalists.
A scene from the play "The Dumb Artist"
Ginkas turned to prose texts many times in the theater. He puts Nikolai Leskov, with his distinctive language, on a par with the first names of Russian literature. Written by Leskov in 1883, the cruel love story of two talented servants of Count Kamensky's serf theater — an actress and a hairdresser — is subtitled "A Story on the Grave." This explains the modest, or rather, poor choice of visual aids. And the characters' clothes — jackets and earflaps — seem to rhyme with the serf theater and prison camp.
The casting will come as a surprise to many: Olga Ostroumova, a People's Artist of Russia, plays the serf actress Lyubov Onisimovna from her enthusiastic girlish age to her sad old age. In fact, this is her benefit. Dmitry Agafonov, a young artist from MTUSA, became a worthy partner of Prima in the title role.
"Tanya"
The Theater named after Vakhtangov
Critics called this chamber play by Alexei Arbuzov, written in 1938 and rewritten in 1947, the reference text of socialist realism. Addressing her today, the Vakhtangovites focus not so much on the era when "anyone becomes a hero" as on the story of insane, painful love and recovery from it. "To love is to forget oneself, to forget for the sake of a loved one," Tanya (Anastasia Zhdanova), the fanatically faithful wife of engineer—inventor Herman (Vladimir Guskov), is seriously convinced. The girl sees the meaning of her life in serving her husband. But that's exactly what she quickly bored him with. He will meet a single-minded businesswoman Maria Shamanova (Polina Kuzminskaya), happily marry her and leave for the mine. But what about the simple Soviet woman Tanya? She, gentle, vulnerable and infantile, will have new challenges and a chance to start from scratch, become a doctor, leave Moscow for the taiga, and meet a new love.
Anastasia Zhdanova as Tanya and Vladimir Guskov as Herman during the press screening of the play "Tanya" at the Evgeny Vakhtangov Theater
Director Sergey Potapov staged a performance full of not only drama and passion, but also humor. What is Semyon Semyonych worth (the author refers to him as a little raven in a cage), who is hilariously portrayed by Artyom Parkhomenko in this realistic performance!
"Certificate of Life"
The production center "YES"
For its debut production, the new theater company chose unexpected, untested, and probably frightening material — a modern play about the Holocaust, written by Australian Ron Elisha and never staged in Russia before. This is a tragicomedy centered on Clara Reich, an elderly Jewish woman with a broken destiny. She clings to her unbearable past, literally revels in it and chokes on it. It seems to her that this bitter memory and her unrelenting anger are the only way to prevent a repeat of past horrors. The work of the Honored Artist of Russia Vera Babicheva has already been named by the first audience as one of the best female roles of the current theatrical season. Not only did Klara lose her husband and little daughter in a concentration camp, but she had a very difficult relationship with her second daughter, Zoya Kaidanovskaya, who was born in a new marriage and in peacetime in Australia, but the German bureaucracy, represented by an official named Schellenberg (Evgenia Simonova), annually demands from the former victim the Nazis provided a document stating that she was alive, and only in this case she would be compensated.
Zoya Kaidanovskaya as Hilda, Vera Babicheva as Clara and Evgenia Simonov as Erica in the play "The Certificate of Life"
Three wonderful actresses, together with director Mikhail Bychkov, create bright, eccentric characters, fortunately the talented play allows, and artist Natalia Voynova came up with grotesque images for the heroines. This, of course, makes it possible to perceive the story less sad, but still, still, still...
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
