Andrey Moguchiy staged Pyotr Gnedich’s drama “Slaves” at the Bolshoi Drama Theater. Review

At the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Drama Theater named after Tovstonogov, pre-premiere showings of Andrei Moguchy’s play “Slaves” based on the play by Pyotr Gnedich took place. I was one of the first to see a four-hour chronicle of Russian history from the time of Paul I Marina Shimadina.

Andrei Moguchiy conceived the idea of ​​staging “Slaves” several years ago, while being the artistic director of the Bolshoi Drama Theater, and produced it as a guest director. Let us remind you that in April 2023, his contract expired, the position of artistic director was abolished in the theater, and the BDT became a director.

Unlike previous productions of Moguchy, the cycle of “Three Fat Men” and “Mother’s Heart” based on Shukshin’s stories, where literary material was only the starting point for constructing one’s own fantasy worlds, in the new performance the director follows the source quite accurately. This is understandable: few people today remember this historical drama about the reign of Paul I. We know the playwright, translator and polymath Pyotr Gnedich rather from the three-volume History of Art, which is still being republished. However, during the author’s lifetime, his “Slaves,” published in 1907, were very popular: in Alexandrinka the benefit role of Princess Catherine was played by Maria Savina, and in Maly by Maria Ermolova. 80 years later, in 1987, director Boris Lvov-Anokhin returned “Slaves” to the stage of the Ostrovsky House especially for actress Elena Gogoleva, who at one time played in this play next to the great Yermolova.

But Moguchy, of course, was not interested in the benefit role for the leading actress of the BDT Marina Ignatova, although she played it perfectly, but in the author’s thoughts about the fate of the homeland and about servility as a phenomenon that is not removed even 150 years after the abolition of serfdom. Gnedich’s drama is quite archaic: there is a lot of talk and melodramatic plots like the seduction of innocent maidens and the recovery of lost children. At the center of the story is the wealthy Plavutin-Plavuntsov family. The elderly but unmarried Ekaterina Pavlovna surrounds herself with servants and dogs, which are clearly higher in her table of ranks, and moves around in a chair on wheels. They say that the proud princess suddenly “began to lose her legs” when Paul I ordered all the nobles to get out of their carriages when meeting his motorcade and greet His Majesty while standing in the St. Petersburg mud. However, it was not possible to protect herself from the royal disfavor – her brother, Prince Alexander Pavlovich (Vasily Reutov), ​​was deprived of all positions and expelled from the capital for sabotaging the emperor’s order to urgently sew a new military uniform in the Prussian style. Paul himself is not in the play, but in the play, among the characters there is “The Thought of the Emperor, Living in the Heads of the Russian Nobility, Officials and Other Residents of St. Petersburg in 1801” – this role is played by the meter-tall actor Alexei Ingelevich. For almost the entire performance, he watches what is happening from the box, eats and drinks, almost without reacting, but the presence of this “all-seeing eye” is certainly felt by everyone.

Andrey Moguchy provided a modern frame for immersion in the past. The performance begins in an empty pavilion, where workers in orange suits are lazily nailing down something. The ancient mansion of the Plavutins-Plavuntsovs has become dilapidated and can no longer be reconstructed. A tremulous female guide (Tatyana Bedova) tells the story of the house to the Chinese delegation, but they are not even interested in this unprofitable property itself, but in the land in a prestigious area of ​​St. Petersburg. The former luxurious estate is doomed to demolition – and its walls will collapse right before the eyes of the audience. The artist Alexander Shishkin, Moguchy’s constant collaborator, is a master of such attractions: in the play “Three Fat Men. Episode 7. Teacher,” tons of sand fell from above, covering the fragile country veranda at the back of the stage and signaling an imminent disaster.

In “Slaves,” the general atmosphere of doom is created by Purcell’s music performed by a small orchestra and the “countertenor-medium” Semyon Mendelssohn. They connect two worlds – past and present. Ghosts of a bygone era appear before the surprised migrant workers. Maids with firefly lamps in their hands spin in a Matisse-like round dance and freeze in sculptural groups – their mistress is no stranger to the sense of beauty. And in the episodes in the house of attorney Vetochkin, a swindler with eternally flaming ears (he is played superbly by Valery Degtyar), Moguchiy seems to release from a forged chest the ugly chthon from his early performances.

But in general, the new production has fewer spectacular stage tricks than usual, and the main thing is virtuosic acting. Anatoly Petrov is hilarious and almost unrecognizable in his grotesque lush sideburns in the role of the cunning majordomo Vedenei, confident that “there are masters, and there are slaves, that’s how God has decreed.” The young Prince Platon (Viktor Knyazhev) is handsome – a gallant hussar with a painted bright blush, who skips as if he had just dismounted from his horse. And his scene with the seduction of Vetochkin’s daughter (Yulia Ilyina) completely turns into a real horse race.

But in the foreground, of course, the heroine of Marina Ignatova is cold and unapproachable, she comes on stage in a black trouser suit, dark glasses, a red wig and on a black chair with a raven sitting on its high back (costume designer – Evgenia Panfilova) . A sphinx woman, similar to Tilda Swinton’s heroines. But gradually her frozen death mask turns into a human face. When a former slave who returned from France, and now a free citizen, Pereydenov (Dmitry Vorobyov), finds the illegitimate daughter of Catherine Pavlovna, her sin, presented in all its ugliness, forces the wayward princess to get up from her chair and kneel, but not in front of the emperor, but in front of a simple scullery maid. .

Mighty, following Gnedich, rethinks the theme of servility not even on a social, but on a psychological and philosophical level. The illustrious prince can also be a slave and live against his own will, every now and then expecting the blow of the whip, and the poor barber can be a free man and not be afraid of anything. But servility and tyranny often turn out to be two sides of the same coin: one cannot be truly free while humiliating and despising others. And in general, the advice of Pyotr Gnedich’s contemporary, Doctor Chekhov, to squeeze a slave out of oneself drop by drop still remains relevant.