Bards from Irkutsk remembered their wives: average, old, sweet

The New Drama Theater brought campfire talk to Moscow

The performance-song “The Gospel According to the Bards” by the Irkutsk New Drama Theater based on the play “Youth is Alive” by Alexander Artemov and Nastasya Khrushcheva was shown at the Golden Mask festival. Conversations around the fire of fifty-year-old men again made me remember the main thing.

Not so long ago, a stormy controversy about bards suddenly began in social networks. Many believe that this is a dying genre, the lot of an aging public, a subculture of the technical intelligentsia no longer interesting to anyone. Once upon a time, bards were considered almost anti-Soviet, they performed in concert halls not in the first row, they were not allowed to go to other places. We inherited such stereotypes: middle-aged bearded guys in stretched sweaters gather in the forest by the fire and bawl the songs “My dear, forest sun”, “It’s great that we are all here …”, they know three chords. The names of Okudzhava, Galich, Sergey and Tatyana Nikitin, Vizbor, Sukhanov, Gorodnitsky, Kim, Dolina, Mityaev were called.

In 2021, the film “Relatives” was released based on the script by Zhora Kryzhovnikov, where the head of the family, on the verge of possible death, decided to fulfill his old dream and visit the Grushinsky festival. Prior to that, Mikhail Segal filmed “Movie about Alekseev”, where Alexander Zbruev played an aged bard. In 2021, Konstantin Bogomolov staged the play “For Every Wise Man” based on the play by Ostrovsky, where a Moscow intellectual sings with a guitar and bows to Veronika Dolina.

“The Gospel According to the Bards” multiplies stereotypes, although director Alexander Artemov staged a performance about the outgoing type of men, “classic gender” and tried to rehabilitate them. The action takes place not just in the forest, but in the Russian psychedelic forest, according to his plan, and it differs from the ordinary Russian forest in that it does not surround you from the outside, but grows inside you. It is based on the play “Youth is Alive”, written by Alexander Artemov in collaboration with Nastasya Khrushcheva. He himself is an actor, playwright, director, founder of the TRU theater in St. Petersburg, works with Andrei Moguchiy in the BDT (“What is to be done?”). Nastasya Khrushcheva is a playwright, musicologist, composer, collaborating with Valery Fokin and Andrei Moguchiy (“Alice” based on the fairy tale by Lewis Carroll starring Alisa Freindlich).

Spectators sit around a small heel in the center of the hall, where there is nothing but chairs, an accordion, two guitars. Everything happens in the dark. No faces are visible, only the glare of a fire. The actors come out in those same stretched sweaters, sit down by the “bonfire”. Only the crackling of branches is heard. So in about one mise-en-scène, four 50-year-old men sit for fifty minutes. Together they are 200 years old. The fifth is the 27-year-old son of their late friend Peter, who died in a fire. All of them sing bard songs, the signature “It’s great that we all gathered here today”, recall the old days and the incident with Peter, who was more and more silent, and his wife was silent. At 23, Peter felt old, and therefore chose an early death. The son of the father did not see, was born after his death.

They scream into the microphone all the time. It seems that as soon as they arrived at an unfamiliar venue, they went out to it without rehearsals, without checking the sound quality. Stunned so that the text no longer mattered. Everyone takes turns remembering something. One wife needed a mediocre one. The second at fifty feels young, and no one gives him more than 27. And his wife is 45 years old, that is, five years younger, but old. The husband looks at her and sees that she is old. And the son is the same: he is 27 years old, and already old. I came with a girl, I wanted to meet my parents. And when she saw dad … No, she didn’t fall in love, but the next day she left the guy, saying that he was old for her. So a man lives, suffers with two old ones – his wife and son, and he himself is young. Funny. The third woman wants something sweet, not bitter. Well, the fourth one is not about women, it’s all about some kind of battle. One friend will dissuade the monologue, they all sing together “How great that we are all gathered here today,” someone else begins his confession. Such they are bards, but they were not. All these are reflections of some imaginary ideas.