Chekhov’s Natasha from Three Sisters has become a symbol of provincial menace

Pink dress, green socks – this combination is no longer bad manners, but it continues to be used

The premiere of the play “Natasha” based on the play by Marina Krapivina and directed by Svetlana Zemlyakova took place on the small stage of the Theater of Nations. It is woven from Chekhov’s associations, the shadows of the NKVD, and the seemingly vanished fears of Muscovites about the ubiquitous provincials.

The main character, Natasha, is a young lady who came from the provinces to the capital, as if transplanted from Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” into modern soil. She gradually gains a position in the Moscow family, becomes the wife of the soft-bodied Andrei (read Prozorov), except that she will not give birth to Bobik, like Chekhov – a miscarriage will interfere. There is even a scene called “Natasha at the gynecologist’s appointment,” but nothing vulgar, no KVN, as they like now, except very long and detailed.

The motives of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” declared by the Theater of Nations are barely guessable. Only the mysterious chain of deaths hints at Leskov’s writing. But for the director, Natasha is a small-town Lady Macbeth, since she has a premonition of impending disaster. At the same time, Svetlana Zemlyakova compares her heroes with Ionesco’s characters, because they constantly want to talk about something, start a conversation, but don’t finish it.

On popular resources, in digests for those who are not used to reading and are content with a brief summary, it is reported that Natasha Prozorova is a bright, but secondary heroine of the play “Three Sisters”, that she is the bride, and then the wife of one of the main characters – Andrei Prozorov . Apparently, she was born and raised in a provincial town, unlike Muscovite Andrei, her future husband. Chekhov’s Natasha wears a pink dress, and Olga Prozorova says to her: “You’re wearing a green belt! Honey, this is not good! By modern standards, the combination of incongruous things is quite appropriate. Natasha in the modern theatrical version is dressed in a dress of the so-called dirty pink color, which Andrei’s sister Masha gave her as unnecessary, and she is wearing bright green socks. Natasha will also try on a red blouse – everything is according to Chekhov – and it suits her. Even the arrogant Mark, Masha’s admirer and Andrey’s friend, will fall in love.

Natasha, as he will say, “from Rostov or Tambov, wherever she is from,” appears at the Kirillovs’ house with a black eye. Her husband had just died in Germany – a native of Kazakh Germans, thirty years older than her, if, of course, all this is true. Natasha has nowhere to live. The train of a sympathetic nurse who brightened up the last days of the head of the refined Moscow Kirillov family will turn out to be a myth. She is no nurse, as it turns out, although she took money for the service. And now she will be accommodated in the linen room as a sign of gratitude.

Playwright Marina Krapivina made a new edition of the play for the Theater of Nations and called it “Abulia,” which characterizes the “lack of will syndrome” inherent in the Kirillov family. There are also motifs from “The Cherry Orchard” in it. The heroine of Natalya Pavlenkova – the widow Olga Sergeevna, the mother of Masha and Andrey – sometimes resembles Ranevskaya, a beautiful and kind lady who lives on memories. Her cherry orchard will be a dacha with artificial plants, which at any moment could go to someone else, since the heirs, after the sudden death of the head of the family, did not bother to re-register it for themselves, as well as a large apartment in the center of Moscow. All these sluggish intellectuals are the offspring of those who worked in the NKVD. They live in a departmental house, where employees of the secret agency were allocated apartments. But why delve into the past? People in civilian clothes, a local police officer, constantly appear in the house, and a certain collective image of a faceless man arises, who is always on the alert and looking after each of us. Performed by Leonid Timtsunik, he (they) are like moths.

On the proscenium there are stacks of old books: Turgenev, Stendhal, memories of Lenin… Throughout the entire performance, the characters threaten to throw away unnecessary rubbish, but it continues to gather dust on the balcony. At the entrance to the small stage, stylized stacks of dummies of books and art objects by the production designer Ekaterina Zloy were installed. Viewers will even see a Natasha mask made by artist Dmitry Shabalin, because Natasha is the heroine of many works of Russian literature, for example, “War and Peace.” Tom Tolstoy will be picked up from the floor a la Chekhov’s Natasha and will read the first lines he comes across about the feelings of young Rostova.

No one smokes in the house anymore, but she dreams of cigarette butts and the smell of smoke everywhere. Natasha is played by Satyricon theater actress Alena Razzhivina, who knows how to fill classical texts with new meanings. One of her most striking roles in Satyricon, where she serves, is Anna Andreevna in “R” after Gogol, directed by Yuri Butusov. Surely it was this work that gave Svetlana Zemlyakov the idea of ​​inviting the actress to her play.

The weak-willed Andrei Kirillov-Prozorov was played by Stanislav Belyaev. He is vulgar, unattractive, runs to his neighbor while her husband is at work, and when he catches them at the “crime scene,” he puts his trousers on inside out. His beautiful sister Masha (Ilona Gashun) is gentle and sympathetic. She meets with Mark (Alexander Devyatyarov from RAMT), a current animal artist. As a matter of principle, he does not write about people, only for the sake of Natasha he is ready to make an exception, sensing the bestial insides in her. Although there is nothing like that in it. She is not a fiend from hell, as they try to convince us. And all these heroes, led by Olga Sergeevna, are absolutely impractical people who do not know what a “multifunctional center” is. Only the provincial Natasha will help cope with tedious household chores and take Andrey to the MFC. Here this institution is like Everest, which still needs to be conquered, and it’s very funny.