Alexander Kalyagin: “You need to undress on stage – undress”

A crisis. 90s. I work at the Art Theater, which at that time had an amazing troupe. After a ten-year renovation, we are finally moving from the building on Tverskoy Boulevard to Kamergersky Lane. And everything seems to be starting to converge for me: I’m acting in films, I already have “Prohindias”, “Dead Souls”, “Mechanical Piano”, and in the theater … And in the theater, for various reasons, trembling and doubt began. Oleg Borisov, Zhenya Evstigneev, director Roza Sirota are leaving the Moscow Art Theater – the troupe began to disintegrate before my eyes. And when Nastya Vertinskaya left, a bad call sounded for me.

I am in a crisis – what should I do? I asked Efremov to switch to one-time, but he began to dissuade me and offered me a role in the new play “Leaving, look around.” And together with Slava Innocent, Natasha Tenyakova, the late Lenochka Mayorova, I played this performance, but to say that it was a success …

And at that moment, theater studios began to appear in Moscow, and I thought: “Here I have already released a good course at the Moscow Art Theater School (Sasha Lazarev, Yulia Menshova, Andryusha Panin, Vera Voronkova were there – the course is awesome), and I offer the guys to decide for ourselves whether we should make a theater or not?” I honestly tell them that I have shooting, a lot of work, but they voted “for” the theater. But while I was walking around with the authorities, who clearly explained to me that everyone wants a theater, but they don’t have new premises, my students were gradually dismantled. Almost everyone. Yes, and from all sides they buzzed in their ears: “You can’t imagine what hell it is to start a theater. We need to find a place, an accountant who does not steal.”

And my friend Sergei Tongur said that he was starting a theatrical business, and he already had my students in the troupe. He invites me to watch a production with which they want to travel around the country in order to earn some money. They asked me: “Is it okay that we put your name on the poster?” “What do you mean, don’t,” I waved my hands. But they began to beg, to put pressure on pity, and then I gave up, but said: “If so, then I will have to rehearse.” So I got into it.

Moscow addresses. The first room of our group was in Tushino in the recreation center at the aircraft factory. The second is also at the plant, but not far from the Garden Ring, in the Mayakovka area. The third – for 1905, near the baths. And also in the Palace of Culture, where meetings were held near some factory. I remember one thing well from that period: we rehearsed on the second floor, and the toilet on the first stank so much … But gradually the directors came to me, and so we started. And only Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov gave us a room on the Arbat, where at that time there was one torn movie screen, and our theater was born there.

Our best performances were born there – Don Quixote, King Ubyu directed by Alexander Morfov, Dream Game directed by Grigory Dityatkovsky. It was there that producer David Smelyansky brought me Robert Sturua, a world-famous director, his theater did not crawl out of Europe. How Argentina adored him, we saw with our own eyes when we went there on tour with The Tempest. I still can’t understand how he gave us, amateur performances, his name?!

And then – everything is like in a good evening: you sit at the table, talking, drinking, singing – you don’t notice the time. So it is with us: we didn’t notice how at first five, then ten, twenty, and now thirty years have flown by.

Fundamental ineptitude. The main thing that I understood when I created the theater is that I am not going to compete with my teachers – Efremov, Efros, Ginkas. What for? What I can as a teacher, I will do. This means that the Shchukin school (now an institute), the Vakhtangov direction, remains the main one. The actors of my course should go through different teachers as much as possible. Just as every great writer (Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ostrovsky) is a theater with its own rules, so different teachers (I’m talking about individual teachers) are also a theater. It is a very good idea to give a student several “vaccinations” at once. Then you are immune protected by various “vaccines” and can go to work in any theater.

I said to myself: “The more I invite different directors to my place, the better my troupe will be.” In general, almost it is, I was not mistaken – the artists of Et Cetera can do anything. And all the directors who come here are happy with the artists – Sturua, Shapiro, Korshunovas, Stein, Pankov. Canadian Vajdi Muawad was generally happy: his “Fires” is still the best tragic performance in Moscow.

On the one hand, it seems sad that Kalyagin seems to be unprincipled, but even in our name there is an idea: Et Cetera – and so on and so forth. And then I said a phrase that became winged: “Everything is possible in the theater, except for boredom and vulgarity.” You need to undress on stage – undress, but only if you led the audience to this, and not because it’s just fashionable, but you want to be in trend. And no one notices in Dead Souls when Sobakevich says to Chichikov during dinner: “I won’t eat an oyster for anything, because I know what it looks like.” This is not vulgarity – the words of Gogol! That’s all: except for boredom and vulgarity.

Each theater should have its own “Princess Turandot”, “Blue Bird”, or “Seagull”. We also have: I will never forget the surprise and delight of Mark Zakharov when he watched our Don Quixote with scenery by Eduard Kochergin. We opened works that had not previously been shown on the Soviet stage: Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu, and this is a very tough thing, with obscenities. They were placed in Et Cetera. There has never been a dramatic Don Quixote. In some ways we were wrong, somewhere we hit, but we searched, developed.

Enjoy. A person should come to the theater and be surprised. Theater is the illusion of life, it is beauty. And on the stage, please – anything. Therefore, the theater, which for me is a holiday, must, firstly, be arranged in an unusual way. Therefore, I did not name the boxes in the hall number one, two, three. Our central box is called “Godot”, to the left of it is a large box – “Falstaff”. Even if a person does not know who he is, has not read Shakespeare, he will be interested. Secondly, I told myself that the hall should be beautiful, and thirdly, there should be a very good buffet. Because the viewer has, for example, the right to say: “I really liked the performance, it’s good.” Or: “The performance today is not very good, but the buffet … They give both this and that.” I think that from the theater, as from a good store, the viewer cannot leave with nothing. He must make some positive impression. Aesthetics and ethics have not been canceled. And if the stage is equipped with various technical capabilities, if the troupe is good, the director is strong and the buffet is good – this is happiness.

30 years. For the anniversary, we are preparing “Mandate” based on the play by Nikolai Erdman. The play is difficult, having practically no theatrical biography. Meyerhold staged this play, but the performance was quickly slammed. The lock is difficult, it is not easy to open … And this is a risk, but who does not take risks does not drink champagne.