From a village woman to a society lady: Yakovleva spoke about her heroines

The schedule is tight – in total, along with the premieres, she has 9 performances in different theaters, on different stages, in different cities: from the Gogol Theater to the Satire Theater, from Moscow to Novosibirsk, from a village woman to a secular lady-philosopher. And not a single similar work: “I think through my heroines very carefully, because I don’t want to have straightforward roles. And then theater is a statement: comedic or philosophical, dramatic or poetic, that’s not the point. This is my personal statement. Otherwise, it’s simply not interesting,” says the actress and tells MK about her heroines.

Heroine No. 1: Moskaleva (“Uncle’s Dream”, Gogol Theater, dir. Alexander Marin)

— It so happened that my brother, Anton Yakovlev, became the artistic director of the Gogol Theater. I understood that all his plans should be connected only with his theater, and I was not an actress of the Gogol Theater. But he decided to include the play in the repertoire, and he and director Sasha Marin offered me the role of Marya Alexandrovna Moskaleva, and Alexander Semchev was invited to play the role of the old prince. In addition to us, only young people are involved in the play.

– But you understand that the performance rests solely on you?

– And you know, I am often a locomotive. It’s a matter of both the volume of the role and the energy that should be manifested throughout the entire performance. So that it doesn’t get boring, so that it doesn’t take too long, so that it’s varied and diverse. Valentin Nikolaevich Pluchek taught me this. When I came to the Satire Theater, Valentin Nikolaevich said: “I have a palette of colors: there are episode actors, there are leading actors. If you are capable of playing a leading role, you must convince me and the audience of it.” And he gave me a role in the play “Barefoot in the Park,” where I was literally spinning, as they say, on my navel, because my character took on the entire energy structure of the production.

— You are on stage for almost three hours. How, excuse me, can you remember so much text?

— It’s not a matter of the amount of text, but how to convey it correctly. I analyze every phrase, every piece, “tweak” the role – what does my heroine want to say? There must always be something behind words, “the word must be pregnant” – that’s what our teachers taught us. I like Evstigneev’s phrase: “Put the character on your shoulder and watch him.” That is, I always look at the image a little from the outside. The most interesting thing in the theater is acting and even some kind of hooliganism, if there are grounds for this, of course. Then the image turns out to be capacious. The movie taught me a lot about this: I played 60 mothers there, but at the same time I tried to make them all turn out completely different. I search and come up with characteristics: social, external. I always need something to grab onto.

– Moskaleva is cunning, unprincipled, dreaming of marrying off her daughter well, even to an old and crazy man, but just to escape from provincial life and get a comfortable life. And in the finale, everyone looks at her, sympathizing with her.

— In the finale, obsessed with her ideas, she goes crazy. It breaks like a doll. Her bar was too high, her obsession was too strong. It is this moment that gives a strong energy boost and makes the viewer empathize. But living on the edge is the most interesting thing. Otherwise, there is no need to go on stage.

Heroine No. 2: She (“Bench”, M-ART. Dir. Mikhail Tsitrinyak)

“Once I was sitting in the buffet of the Gogol Theater with my classmate Sasha Samoilenko, we started talking, and he said that all his life he had dreamed of playing “The Bench.” I then thought: if a person wants it this way, then it should work out. And it turned out – such a human, lively, very warm theater. Apart from acting and being a director, there is nothing there – pure Stanislavsky. This performance is very ascetic, there is almost no scenery – a screen, a bench and a lantern, which is like a separate character. We are playing the 70s and trying to get into that time, to exist in the philosophy of those people – they were different: no cynicism, naive, or something.

— And your heroine, is she the same?

– Yes, she is a little naive, and I wanted to make her lyrical. Although at times she can be straightforward and rude, but this is out of pain. At the same time, she’s so… a little abnormal. Not holy, but very pure. Like those people from the past.

Heroine No. 3: Countess (“The Queen of Spades”, Contemporary Enterprise Theatre, Directed by Oleg Ilyin)

“One day they called me: “We want to offer you a job, but you see, your heroine… is not beautiful.” I was happy: it’s happiness to do something that I haven’t done since college. I always say: “I started with comic old women, and I’ll end with them.” While still a student, I outplayed a huge number of old women – they were the only ones they offered me. And only once, when I became “young” on stage, Pluchek took me to Satire. So I’m not afraid of old women at all.

However, my Queen of Spades is not the one everyone is used to. The plot, of course, is absolutely Pushkin: three cards, Hermann, and so on. But the playwright wrote the old woman’s line in a very interesting way: the entire plot of the play is threaded on her memories. I set only one condition: “I will wear a mask.” And at first I saw doubt in the faces of the creative team, because the audience wants to see the artists alive, and, in the end, the artists should be recognizable. Recently we were in St. Petersburg, during the intermission everyone began to ask: “Why didn’t you bring Alena Yakovleva, because you promised on the poster!” They won’t know. Only at the very end of the performance do I take off my mask and come out in a beautiful dress and with a turban on my head. My partners are wonderful: Makar Zaporozhsky, Vanya Stebunov, Andrey Frolov, Anna Glaube, Natalya Skomorokhova.

— How do you not get lost in the texts, heroines, ways of existing on stage, how do you remember every drawing?

— I have all this “files” in my head: when I need it, I take it out, when I don’t need it, I put it away. There was a period when I had 12 film projects going on, and only this system with “files” helped. In the theater, of course, it’s a little different, because you can’t immediately get out of the role. There are such performances when rest is needed – the day before and the day after.

Heroine No. 4: Mrs. Higgins (“Pygmalion”, Theater of Satire. Dir. Victor Kramer)

— When Victor Kramer offered me the role of Professor Higgins’ mother, played by Sergei Chonishvili, I seriously doubted it. I said that I was not interested in the role-function, because in the play this role is precisely a function. And then we came up with a move: I bought books – Shaw’s correspondence, his aphorisms, articles, we wrote out everything that might be useful to us, and from all this we compiled a monologue. I’ve never done anything like this. Moreover, for the first time in my life I communicate with the audience, asking the audience philosophical questions – this is the absence of a fourth wall. Through the text, we came up with the heroine’s past, her life experience, so that the role would be voluminous, and the viewer would understand everything about her. I have never had such a philosophical mother – woven from paradoxes, wise. “It is better to live with a passionate woman than with a boring one. True, they are sometimes strangled, but rarely abandoned,” “There are only two tragedies in life. One is to lose love, and the other is to find it” – this is what Bernard Shaw tells the audience through the mouth of my heroine.

My heroine turned out to be a little “over”, a little observer. She loves her son, but with her own position and outlook on life. Authoritarian, but wise. Grand lady. She is also a bit of a provocateur and manipulator, but not in the bad sense of the word. “Great people don’t need happiness,” she tells her son, provoking him to strive for happiness. After all, Kramer made a play about love. About the love between Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. This love cannot end in a happy marriage, which is why the play has an open ending: I hug the heroine Angelina Strechina, so that the viewer has at least some hope for a happy ending, so that there remains, as we say, a “candle”. I hug and tell the audience: “Life is never easy, but if you are not afraid of it, it can be delightful.”