General and his love: the Soviet saga was staged at the Vakhtangov Theater

“The General and His Family” is the name of the premiere performance, which took place on the New Stage of the Theater. Evgeny Vakhtangov. It is based on the historical novel by Timur Kibirov, who received the Big Book Prize for it two years ago. Although it is difficult to call this family Soviet saga directly historical. From the premiere – the columnist “MK”.

The events take place in the USSR, in 1970, which got lost somewhere between the 100th anniversary of V.I. Lenin and the next date of the October Revolution. The scene of action is a military garrison in a small Siberian town, the name of which, in fact, few people have heard – Shosha. The season is winter. A huge fan in a metal mesh installed on the left is a sign of both the winter cold with howling wind and the airfield. Right on the runway in full dress (an overcoat of solid cloth with large-star epaulettes, a fur hat made of astrakhan) stands a short general with bushy eyebrows. To his left, on armchairs, which you still see in Russian airports, arranged in three rows, sit people dressed according to the possibilities of the last quarter of the 20th century – no fashion for you, but who got what. But in the costumes, which in the 70s seemed like no, not yet touched by brands, the artist Maxim Obrezkov (who is also a stage designer) added a little grotesque, which made these costumes look a little caricatured. Just like the heroes of the play are caricatured, but only to the extent that it does not allow irony to fall into cynicism and spitefulness about the Soviet past.

Here is General Vasily Ivanovich with the funny surname Bochazhok (Maxim Sevrinovsky) sparingly, in a military way, begins the story: “Last time, when Anechka came on vacation from Moscow, a strange, useless conversation took place between them. They offended each other and quarreled to the bone.

The words of the general are picked up by a woman in glasses and, apparently, pedantic in everything: “Last time it didn’t work out at all well. They parted like strangers.”

And again the general: “And it began with the fact that Vasily Ivanovich got Anechka a Yugoslav sheepskin coat – thanks to Larisa Sergeyevna from the military department, she helped. And when the daughter was spinning around the mirror, she threw herself on her father’s neck, shouting: “Daddy, daddy! Thanks!” – Vasily Ivanovich in response, take it and grumble: “But you don’t like the Soviet regime …” Yes, he wanted to joke … Just a joke.

Woman with glasses: “But Anechka did not support his joke.” “Do you like it yourself?” – “I then? Like”. “And why do you like her?” – “And the fact that she raised me, fed me and brought me to people, in the end.” “But first she deprived you of your parents.”

The reference to the recent past of fathers and children immediately turns into the present – the general’s daughter Anechka (Polina Rafeeva), who was only remembered, returned to her father from Moscow in … an interesting position. For an exemplary career officer, this is like a sickle on … In short, the shame of the family, period! And this circumstance is the main plot line of the novel, around which director Svetlana Zemlyakova reconstructed a time that is painfully familiar to some, but a blank page for others, causing surprise and bewilderment in half.

But the further the new Russia moves away from the old Soviet one, the former country with a distance of three decades in the theater is seen more clearly, more clearly. It reveals a completely different state, where the human factor was a colorful individual, and not a digitized element. Where Soviet citizens have not yet demonstrated social aggression, and the conflict of generations proceeded without crime, which newspaper and Internet chronicles abound today, backed up by trashy online.

Kibirov’s prose was divided into twenty voices on stage, and one actor is responsible for several characters at once (Churovskaya, Galochkin, Kravchenko, Yudin), telling about their role and actions in history, not forgetting to give them characteristics along the way. The development of events, the transformation of characters in Zemlyakova, in which the degree of conventionality is brought, it seems, to the absolute, is rapidly taking place: a quarrel between a stern general and Anya the bloody or a dunce son (Semyon Arzumanov), the librarian Masha (Polina Bondar) clumsily flirts with ordinary Lyova Blumenbaum (Eyub Faradzhev), who in a moment is already sailing to the islands with a new beloved Anechka, who recently gave birth to a boy Sasha (Danila Gnido), and he wanders among adults lost in love, telling, like some Ole Lukoye, a fairy tale about them. A couple of times Anna Akhmatova will be drawn with a characteristic profile from Modeliani (Lada Churovskaya), whose poems the general’s daughter raves about. And a woman with glasses – Larisa Sergeevna (Olga Borovskaya) – quite unexpectedly for herself, will cheat on her husband.

And it seems that this Soviet saga, which began in the distant 70s and rolled back even further in the second act, into the 50s, is not divided into scenes, episodes – here everyone and everything miraculously coexist, as in a communal kitchen with harmless residents. And in such a game of literary text and theater, the production has a special value. The game of the young (only they are busy), reckless, light as breathing, is full of live music, which is the most important element here. The performance of the artists does not sound hits of the Soviet stage, as one might expect, but something spicy Latin American and electronic, which is very suitable for Soviet reality and emphasizes in it that special thing that made it unlike anything else, neither in the best, nor even at its worst.

Society here is just a backdrop against which love blossoms – both the obstinate Anechka with Leva Blumenbaum, and the most severe General Bochazhka with Traviata Zakharovna. The love of the latter, outlined in the first act, will be revealed in detail in the second, but, alas, tragically fade away. And here the actress Maria Volkova, who is engaged in the theater mainly in lyrical roles (easy Olga in “Eugene Onegin”), will reveal her dramatic talent.

The General and His Family, like no other performance, shows the young composition of the Vakhtangov troupe and its potential – by far the strongest in Moscow. The director was able to show everyone, and there is not a single (!!!) passing character in the performance. Maxim Sevrinovsky does not allow his hero to go beyond a rigid drawing, but with all the stinginess of external expressive means, the artist literally makes the audience sympathize with this martinet, and in the final scenes almost cry from how he plays love – father and husband. Remember the last time you had to swallow a lump in your throat at the theater?