Eternal February – Newspaper Kommersant No. 226 (7427) of 12/06/2022

The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre hosted the premiere of The Black Blizzard, the first production of Anastasia Bukreeva’s play of the same name in Moscow. About how the performance of Denis Azarov, ex-artistic director of the Viktyuk Theater, acquired an unplanned actual sound, tells Marina Shimadina.

The play “Black Blizzard” was written in 2020 and immediately became one of the leaders of drama competitions: it was included in the short list of “Remarks” and “Climax”, sounded at the “First Reading” in St. Petersburg and at “Lubimovka” in Moscow, where the director of the reading was just Denis Azarov, and the performers were the artists of the Roman Viktyuk Theater, which he then directed. Initially, the production of the play was supposed to be there, but after Azarov left the post of artistic director, this project was realized at the Electrotheatre; there, in addition to the production company Art-Project, he was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives and the Russian Cultural Foundation, but this is not at all the optimistic and ideologically sustained spectacle that you expect with such illustrious patronage.

The text by Anastasia Bukreeva was written at the height of the pandemic and, apparently, reflected that state of isolation, the inability to escape from the closed space where you are kept by incomprehensible force majeure circumstances. According to the plot, a certain businessman Sverdlov comes to the city of N. to find out the reasons for the death of a miner, but instead he himself gets entangled in the viscous haze of the harsh polar region, which is approaching a terrible black blizzard, and the planes do not fly, because the mysterious bear has bitten the cable. In the description of the city and even specific geographical points, Norilsk is clearly guessed – the text even mentions one of the places of mass graves of Norillag, “Norilsk Golgotha”. But the playwright insists that the play is not about a particular city, but about our country as a whole, about the people who live here, often in completely unbearable conditions.

And yet, the Black Blizzard is not at all a dock, as one might assume. Rather, our Russian Twin Peaks. From comparisons, Salnikov’s “Petrovs in the flu” still come to mind, where the seemingly recognizable Yekaterinburg of the working outskirts blurred in the flu-like delirium of the heroes and turned into a surrealistic space. Director Denis Azarov also gravitates towards “surprise” and absurdity – one can recall his “Feast” according to the Oberiuts and the otherworldly “Dead Souls” in the Roman Viktyuk Theater or the phantasmagoric “Garden” in the Electrotheatre. And in Bukreeva’s text, he emphasizes precisely this mystical facet, which is largely facilitated by the psychedelic music of Kirill Taushkin, the light of Nikita Chernousov and the choreography of Anna Zakusova.

On the stage, designed by Alexei Tregubov, there is a hall of the local museum of local lore, more like a deserted airport, with a huge mammoth tusk and a stuffed black-brown fox. The guide dressed as a flight attendant (Anastasia Fursa) here speaks in a strange mechanical voice of a digital online assistant, sometimes switching to the low frequencies of a ventriloquist: “You will never leave here.” The theater named after the classic, where the plays of the classics are shown, for some reason looks like a prison here, and the bright shopping center looks like a temple. But the main local fun is to go with guns and pitchforks to a bear that no one has seen, but it is traditionally to blame for everything. Well, who else?

Among the characters that Sverdlov meets are a dead miner and a miner who will die in two weeks, and the rest, by and large, are the same miners. Death is commonplace here, it is poured through the veins of people like coal dust, like a black blizzard. And in the frozen ground, where workers descend every day to look into the face of the abyss, the bones of mammoths are mixed with the bones of thousands of prisoners.

The play by Anastasia Bukreeva, although it was written two years ago, very accurately falls into today’s feeling of timelessness, confusion and a total sense of guilt. The text is arranged according to the rondo principle – in each conversation the main character repeats the same monologue with different variations: “I don’t really understand how I ended up in this city. This is a very, very strange story. The fact that my relatives lived here somehow does not mean anything. Lived, but for a very long time. Everyone has lived somewhere. We have a big country. But why am I here?

These confusion and misunderstanding – what do I have to do with it, what is the connection between me and this terrible place where people have “holes in the solar plexus” – the main intonation of the play. The protagonist played by Yevgeny Kapustin is a touching and sweet modern boy, a clean office worker of a coal company, in every possible way denies his involvement in what is happening and what happened here. Well, just think, the name Sverdlov is not the one who shot the royal family. Although nothing can be said for sure. And if his ancestors lived here, then they could be either prisoners or guards, one of the two. And the hero invents for himself a Pole grandfather, a Swedish grandmother and a Japanese great-grandmother, if only to remove at least part of the birth trauma from himself. Get rid of responsibility. But this is impossible. “I think we crucified Christ. It was we who burned people in cells and killed babies. Therefore, the bear bit the cable, ”says the girl with golden hair (Yulia Abdel-Fatah), the only soul mate for Sverdlov in this hell, in the finale. And there is only one way to break out of the vicious circle – to go into a black blizzard and stop being. True, Denis Azarov makes the finale not so gloomy and hints that the hero is only dreaming of all this, but the black blizzard really sweeps him away.