A short play about the transience of life was staged at the Theater of Nations

In “Terminal 3” Nikita Kobelev spoke about birth and death in one hour

On the Small Stage of the Theater of Nations, Nikita Kobelev staged a short play about the transience of life – “Terminal 3” based on a one-act play by the Swedish playwright Lars Nuren. The state of anxiety accompanies the audience, before whom the life of a person passes from the moment of birth to early death. We will never know what he was like, but we will understand a lot about the past and present of his parents, who continue to reproach each other and discover meanings that are important to themselves.

“Terminal 3” is a one-act drama from the “Terminal” cycle, which includes eleven plays by the Swedish playwright, writer and poet Lars Nuren, who continues the tradition of Beckett and Pinter. The scene of the action changes: it takes place either at the airport, or in the waiting room of the hospital, but anywhere … In a certain transit zone, which is like a temporary stop for a further leap into space or the abyss.

The performance is only an hour long, and this is a convenient option for modern life, especially in a metropolis. I ran into the theater for a short while, got an emotional and intellectual recharge, and rushed on. For the most part, the audience now digests three-hour performances with difficulty. But even in an hour, as it turned out, you can say a lot about the most important thing.

In the gray featureless space, reminiscent of both a hospital corridor (there are x-rays on the walls), a railway station, and a host of other universal premises, which the artist Nana Abdrashitova came up with, everything corresponds to what Lars Nuren wrote about. This is the zone between life and death, the crossroads of the present and the future, where the born and the dead wander. The stage is invisibly divided into two mirror halves. Only the clock shows different times. On the right – very young heroes – He and She – in anticipation of the birth of a child.

On the left is an older couple – a Man and a Woman, as they are called here. The faces of the young seem familiar to them, they have seen them somewhere before. And the very room itself evokes vague memories, as if they had already been here.

Both of them have the feeling that they went somewhere neither there, they were in the wrong room. To a young couple, Man and Woman appear to be elderly people, although they are about forty. A video projection appears on the screen – a close-up of the characters’ faces. That rare case when it is interesting to consider them, since this is not a banal photo enlargement, but a real movie with an open display of emotions.

What is happening on the stage is reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Married Life”, where episodes arise from the twenty-year life of the characters together, who eventually come to a divorce. And he becomes an incentive for a flash of opposite feelings – compassion and unexpected spiritual intimacy. So here, twenty years later, the former spouses experience something that they could not even imagine once. An unwanted child at the age of 19 voluntarily passes away, as if by the will of fate. Everything is pre-programmed. The young heroine does not want to become a mother so much. She has other plans for life. But the child will be born. And years later, his death will bring together long-separated people. She will do what the birth of a child, which alienated loving spouses, could not give.

At first, the ratio of actors is like a chess game. Who is who? What will be the next move? Anything can be assumed. Either these are the same people at different stages of life, or they have a split personality, or maybe they are reflected in the lives of others. Ordinary turns into something infernal. The conversation moves to another plane – from everyday life to outer space.

An older couple – a Woman and a Man – were played by an actress from St. Petersburg Olga Belinskaya, invited from Alexandrinka, and Kirill Grebenshchikov, who works in different theater territories. The young people were played by Asya Fomenko, a student of Mindaugas Karbauskis, from the Mayakovsky Theater and Alexei Slavkin from the School of Dramatic Art, who starred in all Andrei Eshpay’s films of recent years, from Dots and Kuprin to Adult Daughters.

There is also a Security Guard – Dmitry Zhuravlev – a kind of diluting, the only person from the outside. Actors have a tough job. They are nearby, dangerously close, when the viewer feels their every movement, look, and you need not lie, otherwise the performance will die. It can be seen that the actors are given everything is not easy. After the performance, they have devastated faces, as if they themselves experienced the dislike and love of their hero, loss and a fatal lack of joy.