Fedorov staged Madame Bovary almost unlike Flaubert: a sagging sofa, dull high-rise buildings

Anton Fedorov, who is increasingly called the hope of Russian theater, staged Madame Bovary at the Mask Theater. His mystical performances, devoid of literal realism, are always attended by eminent colleagues. Leonid and Oksana Yarmolnik, directors Svetlana Proskurina and Marina Brusnikina, actors Maxim Vitorgan and Sofia Shidlovskaya became interested in the unusual interpretation of Gustave Flaubert’s novel. Shortly before the premiere, the project’s producer Leonid Roberman had to go through a difficult moment.

For the second time in his practice, Roza Khairullina, who was rehearsing the role of Charles Bovary’s mother, decided to leave the unfinished performance. She stopped answering calls and simply disappeared. Leonid Roberman behaved decisively – they invited another actress.

Anton Fedorov is an actor by first education, a director by second education, twice a graduate of the Theater Institute named after. Shchukin, where his masters were Vladimir Poglazov and Yuri Pogrebnichko. Anton acted in films, but something very important did not happen. A year ago, he received two “Golden Masks” for the best small-scale performance – “Child” at the Voronezh Chamber Theater – and as a costume designer for “Morphine,” which he staged at the Pskov Drama. Now he is rehearsing “Heart of a Dog” at the Moscow Youth Theater, which is bold after the famous 1987 performance by Henrietta Yanovskaya and Sergei Barkhin. In February 2023, Fedorov became the chief director of the Novosibirsk theater “Old House”. And after a successful film debut – the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the series “World! Friendship! Gum!” — will begin filming a four-episode project in the summer.

He has a cinematic mindset, and it’s rare that his performances are performed without the big screen on stage. There is a special craving for animation, which was felt in “Morphine”. In “Ivan’s Childhood,” staged a little earlier at the Kazan Youth Theater, Anton Fedorov used a puppet – practically Nikolai Burlyaev in miniature and in childhood, as he was in Tarkovsky’s film of the same name.

In Madame Bovary, and he himself dramatized Flaubert’s novel, he was interested in the natural, original man, just like Flaubert, whose ideas he brought to caricature, to guignol in the original sense, where glove puppets came to life thanks to the fingers of the one who controlled them.

A large screen is installed on the stage, on which characters appear in close-up, foliage rustles, the French past is replaced by a dull present, modern faceless quarters. Nearby there is another screen – a snow-white side wall, given over to the animation film director Nadya Goldman. She already worked with Anton Fedorov on “The Pit” according to Platonov in “The Old House”. In her cartoon “Wormwood-25”, made a year ago, the 30-year-old heroine lives a boring life, although she has a husband and a lover. But there is also a problem – as a girl she is stuck in an elevator and cannot get out of the darkness. Almost like Emma Bovary stuck in a black spot.

There is no furniture as such on the stage, except perhaps a sagging sofa from the Soviet Khrushchev, on which the Bovary couple sleeps. The material world appears on a white wall in the form of living, pulsating graphics by Nadya Goldman. At the left portal there is a real object environment with a carriage on which the Bovary family rushes like a bird, a bar counter, a pharmacy counter – this is already the domain of set designer Igor Fomin, Fedorov’s constant collaborator.

The characters are all ridiculous, phantom, like cartoon characters. They speak a mixture of French and Nizhny Novgorod. Foreign words and phrases turn into Russian and vice versa thanks to phonetics and wordplay. “Bertha is better” sounds like Bertolucci, although the classic of Italian cinema has nothing to do with Flaubert. This is absurdity in the spirit of Kharms – “here to be there.”

The couple Emma and Charles are resolved in one way, and the shopkeeper, pharmacist and others, sprinkled with the ashes of time, are resolved in a slightly different way. And they are all wound up, ticking like a clock, moving their paws, not people – insects.

Emma Bovary was played by Natalya Rychkova, who worked with Anton Fedorov back in the space “Inside” in the play “Where have you been for so long, dude?” There she played an average woman. Emma is the same, stuck on the edge of eras. Her conversation with the shuttleman Leray (plastically precise work by Rustam Akhmadeev) could have turned the performance into a different plane. “You’re Russian, so speak Russian,” he will tell her. The performance, like a ship, will bypass the dangerous reef and follow its own course.

Semyon Steinberg played Charles Bovary as a soft, eternal child dependent on his mother. Their wedding night on a broken sofa will become a daily nightmare for Emma. Charles screams in a fit of passion and immediately falls asleep snoring. Emma is saved by books, with which she falls asleep while sitting on the floor. My husband asks every morning: “Have you read it again?”

Charles’s mother is like a monolith. She is devoid of emotions. Her love for her son is strange, like a seizure of property. Her dance with her son is creepy. With her whole body she fences him off from her daughter-in-law. Mother Bovary was played brightly and deliberately dispassionately by Olga Lapshina, who replaced Rosa Khairullina. When Emma gives birth, she will be the one who will uproot the long rope of the umbilical cord. A nondescript toy will be born, from which little Bertha will grow up, and Charles’s mother will take care of her upbringing. The girl with the face of an old woman was played by Anna Nikishina – a miniature actress, the discovery of Anton Fedorov. By chance he saw her in a nightclub and invited her to the play. Bertha will become Emma’s terror.

Emma’s red-haired seducer, Rodolphe, played by Arthur Beschastny, is not just a macho man. He is a parody of Van Gogh with a bandaged, bleeding ear. Why? God knows. How else to explain the absurdity of the world? Emma’s other gentleman, Leon, is an equally bright and narcissistic creature played by Sergei Shaydakov. Together they are her death.

Emma is like the defeated Maid of Rouen. Her husband will take her to Rouen to unwind. They will watch a black-and-white adaptation of Flaubert in the cinema, sit in front of us, barely making their way to their seats, spilling popcorn. Charles will not have any analogies with his own life. He is deaf and almost mute, which makes life easier. Ordinary life of ordinary people. But for some reason Emma dared to leave this world.