Andrei Prikotenko’s performance “Bovary” at the Theater of Nations. Review

The last premiere of the season at the Theater of Nations was Andrey Prikotenko’s play Bovary. From the title of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, only the second part remained here, since the director decided to focus not on the main character Emma, ​​but on her husband Charles. What came of it, tells Marina Shimadina.

After the first magazine publication of “Madame Bovary” in 1856, Gustave Flaubert, as you know, was brought to trial for “insulting morality and morality.” Emma Bovary’s love affairs and naturalistic descriptions of her death shocked French readers, but the scandal, as usual, only fueled interest in the novel. Many also resented the lack of positive characters in the book, the so-called death of the hero.

Petersburg director Andrey Prikotenko, who in recent years has successfully headed the Novosibirsk theater “Old House”, and recently, after the dismissal of Timofey and Alexander Kulyabin, moved to the “Red Torch”, as if he decided to correct this “flaw”. He made the main character – and quite positive – Emma Bovary’s husband Charles, a simple provincial doctor, blindly in love with his wife and not noticing her betrayals. The reception is not new. Thus, the playwright Vasily Sigarev changed the optics of perception of Tolstoy’s characters in his play Karenin, which was widely distributed throughout the theaters of the country. And the famous Tom Stoppard showed the events of Hamlet from the point of view of minor characters – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But for this kind of tricks with the removal of the main plot out of the brackets, you need to be Stoppard, or at least have an original play based on the novel at hand – staging is clearly not enough here.

Charles in the performance is played by Alexander Semchev, and this is an ideal actor’s hit. Soft, timid, naive and touching, he looks at his wife enthusiastically, as at the height of perfection. In order to please her and not disappoint her with a refusal, he decides on an adventurous operation and cripples the patient. And even when her huge debts become apparent, he continues to defend the chivalrous and insolent Emma from the just reproaches of her mother in a chivalrous manner. Semchev’s most powerful scene is in the finale, when, after the death of his wife, the hero discovers her numerous love letters and experiences a real collapse of the world, but finds the strength to accept and forgive.

The role of Emma went to Alexandra Revenko from the Gogol Center, who had previously played with Semchev at the Bronnaya Theater in Bogomolov’s play Uncle Leva based on the film Pokrovsky Gates. Lyudochka and Hobotov got married in the new performance, but did not become happy. The heroine of Revenko is cold to Charles from the very beginning and perceives marriage as an opportunity to go out, albeit with such a bumpkin spouse. Emma’s dresses, designed by Prikotenko’s constant collaborator, artist Olga Shaishmelashvili (who is also the author of the set design), are really stunning. But the actress, in fact, has nothing to play – she is only an object of love and adoration here. Her whole real life, full of passions, takes place somewhere behind the stage, outside the brackets of the theatrical narrative. And at home she languishes, misses and gets sick when she learns about the departure of her beloved Rodolphe (Oleg Savtsov). The only means of expressing herself, her true feelings for Emma, ​​her voice and her lover is the double bass, on which the actress had to learn to play.

The third main character, replacing the narrator, in the production is the character of Elena Morozova. It is her ironic, insinuating, mocking voice that drives the story forward. The actress does not just read Flaubert’s author’s text, but becomes a kind of trickster, instigator and observer at the same time. Like an entomologist who pierces his subjects with pins and watches with curiosity as they squirm.

In one of his lifetime caricatures, Flaubert was depicted as a pathologist dissecting the body of Madame Bovary. The play by Andrei Prikotenko is also similar to such an operation, only a different hero becomes its object. The mirrored, steel-sparkling stage looks like a sterile dissecting room. In the first episode, Charles is lying on a metal table under a sheet, from which Elena Morozova takes off her clothes with the help of medical clamps. All further action is just flashbacks of his fading memory.

In the performance, as in the novel, there is a lot of physiology, however, played out in a very theatrical way. Here are the surgical operations of Charles, and bloodletting with whole fountains of blood, the birth of Emma and her painful arsenic poisoning with profuse vomiting. With all this, the production cannot be called naturalistic. Even in repulsive moments, she remains stylish and aloofly beautiful. Until the very end, the viewer has nothing to connect to and no one to connect to. And in the finale, when Emma’s numerous dresses take off into the air above the stage, we get a purely aesthetic, visual pleasure, but we are left with a cold nose. The operation was successful, but the patient was more dead than alive.