A checkered luggage bag with money was burned in the theater “At the Nikitsky Gate”

Mark Rozovsky presented the second new product of 2024 – a play based on the play “Face” by Alexander Galin. The premiere took place on a tragic day: on March 22, when spectators were leaving the theater building on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, the first news about the massacre at Crocus appeared, and a couple of hours later the capital authorities issued a decree canceling all public events. And although Galin’s work is not about terrorists and his victims, but about “businessmen” of the 90s, mafia banks and money laundering, the main message in it is simple and clear: money, if you are ready to do anything for it, cripples the soul and ultimately As a result, they depersonalize the person.

It’s impossible to write a review of the play without spoilers, but I’ll try to retell it as little as possible. A former employee of a plant in Izhevsk, Andrei Bragin (Vladimir Davidenko), during the time of “primary accumulation of capital”, was raised to the height of director of a Moscow bank (“money fell on him like from the sky” – this is a quote), and then they decided to remove him. To avoid the fate of being shot by a killer, Andrei turns to a plastic surgeon, completely transforms his appearance, leaves his wife (Natalia Denisova) and goes abroad in the guise of the Romanian Arnold (the pseudonym, obviously, due to the popularity of Schwarzenegger). This is the first time layer.

Already today, Arnold-Andrei returns to Russia, becomes the owner of a restaurant, and sees his wife in the temple, which he himself once restored with gangster money. His wife has turned into an exemplary parishioner, but willingly responds to attention to herself – and now the “first” date is scheduled.

There, to the restaurant, Bragin invites the plastic surgeon Solovyova (Natalya Troitskaya) and her husband, the psychotherapist Drankov (Denis Yurchenkov). At the meeting, he demands to return his former face (the motive here is strange – he does not want to allow his wife to cheat on Andrei with Arnold, but the banker is clearly not in his right mind).

Bragin first asks Solovyova to accept the order, offering a bag of currency. “Oh, come on, we only work in a white way,” the doctor flirts, trying to refuse, but the former client waves a pistol – and it turns out that last time the weapon was the main argument, and in general Bragin is stuck in the nineties: he wastes money, shoots at the crows that irritate him from the window and causes mayhem in every possible way (for him the whole world is a shooting gallery, where you can and should shoot at targets if you are willing to pay). And the tears on his fake face are not from the “rich people also cry” set, but, if you like, “bandits cry too.”

The conditions for the emergence of conflict in the work have been dealt with. We need to say a few words about caste. Davidenko in the role of a man in a conventional “raspberry jacket” (the jacket is actually colored checkered, but this is a metaphor) is beautiful and organic. He is the one who primarily pulls the burden of the performance, this is especially noticeable by the fact that there are only four people on the stage in front of us.

Denisova, aged by make-up artists by “eleven years”, the last break of the aging lady, her transformation into Natasha Rostova, is not so good: with all due respect to her acting experience, she lacks passion and frenzy, especially in the “crisis” scenes. But yes – she very well showed the “peeling away” of feigned decency – she proved to the audience that both at fifty and at sixty years old a woman can be attractive, seductive, passionate, and that this is the norm, and not the exception to the rule.

An important detail: the small hall of the theater “At the Nikitsky Gate” is very small in size, and after all the bottles were uncorked (and the fake one wouldn’t shoot, that’s understandable) and several were poured, the smell of champagne could be heard, especially when the stage was washed with sparkling wine. It turns out that the actress was playing at least after sipping a few glasses – and at the same time pretending to be drunk, but not really drunk.

Alexander Galin, when creating the play “Face,” had in mind, of course, both Gogol’s “Portrait” and Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” And in general, he took into account the tradition of world literature about a person’s loss of himself under the influence of money, only his character paid for external beauty and he is younger – and therefore he is anti-Plyushkin (if we start from Gogol) and anti-gobsek (if we start from Balzac).

But the whole point is that Bragin finds the strength to challenge wealth, he curses the dollar and says goodbye to it. In conversations with a psychotherapist, the banker articulates hatred of Franklin, who looked at an entire generation from a hundred dollar bill – and destroyed that generation (“we all wanted to fuck him – and in the end he fucked us”).

Perhaps we did not expect such anti-Americanism from Rozovsky and the production duo (Natalia Lyudskova, Denis Yurchenkov) – but we could expect from Galin, who, in fact, lives in America and knows it from the inside. But his “anti” is not directed against the States as a country, but against capitalism as the power of capital.

And the fact that Andrei-Arnold in the finale burns checkered luggage bags with dollars hidden in his hiding place under the floor (even at the visual level this is a reference to Colonel Zakharchenko’s bags) is a truly unexpected move, a powerful act of self-purification and self-liberation.

Andrei is healing, his “abandoned wife” is healing too, in her own way, she learned to be “sharp”, made her husband fall in love with her again, like Maksakova’s heroine in the film “The Bat”.

And businesswoman Solovyova (played by Natalya Troitskaya with a wonderful chill on her face, characteristic of doctors) is interested in only one thing: did the banker burn everything? Or the handbag initially offered to her for her services survived – with this loot, she and her weak-willed and no less greedy husband leave the stage, into which the authors invest special symbolism: in the future there will be no place for such people.

But this is in the future – but for now our contemporaries are ready to kill everyone who meets them on the way, for a measly half a million.

Can art be a vaccine against this? Yes, it can, because it calls for at least “one day to live like a white man” and “take care of your faces.” The last quote is especially heartfelt: it contains both the wisdom of the proverb “take care of honor from a young age” and the call of the classic of Ukrainian literature Oles Gonchar to protect the cathedrals of our souls.

It remains to mention that in the most confessional moments the characters in “Face” turned to a black theatrical mask placed at the entrance to the auditorium; So, Davidenko read a monologue, holding it in his hands. We saw the same technique in Rozovsky’s performance from the “Poetry Tape” series about Brodsky.