Gozzi from the future

Director Andrey Prikotenko staged Carlo Gozzi’s fiaba Turandot at the Theater on Bronnaya, rewriting it in a new way and moving its action into the not so distant future. The world has already been taken over by China, and now any performance is supposed to be accompanied by Chinese titles. I attended an hour and a half lesson in Chinese literacy Gleb Sitkovsky.

The reverence for hieroglyphs in the new wonderful world is so great that they eat up literally half of the stage space. The top one, of course. In the lower part, Gozzi’s characters, almost touching their heads on the low-hanging lamps, walk and talk about love and death in quiet unobtrusive voices. Palace of the Chinese princess Turandot? Does not look like it. Humanity has long moved to the bunker (artist – Olga Shaishmelashvili) and survives as best it can.

But not everything is as gloomy as it might seem at first glance. Even in this post-apocalyptic world, there are some commedia dell’arte characters who continue to recklessly joke. True, Tartaglia, Pantalone, Brighella, it seems, did not survive the apocalypse. But then there is Truffaldino in a traditional Italian mask and with a frilled collar. And it’s okay that he had to wander a little and add the ending “xiao”, which in Chinese means “baby”, to his name. What the chatty Truffaldinsiao, performed by Ivan Tarasov, doesn’t talk about – about Biden, and about the inhabitants of Patryki, and about behind-the-scenes undercover Telegram channels. “Conscience? What conscience? Well, give light to the hall, – he commands the light workers. – So, raise your hands, whoever has a conscience. One, two, three … Everything is in order, we continue, no one has a conscience. Next to Truffaldinsiao, the silent Secretary (Daniil Chup) walks like a shadow – perhaps he was assigned to the talker so that he would not joke something superfluous: the times are now, you yourself understand.

Do not forget Truffaldinsiao and say hello to the Vakhtangov, who “most likely will not understand us.” You can’t do without greetings: any performance based on “Princess Turandot” is doomed to be compared with the legendary performance by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, which was released 100 years ago. Surely someone in the hall will remember another performance based on Turandot. The current artistic director of the Theater on Bronnaya, Konstantin Bogomolov, released his version of Gozzi’s fairy tale at the Pushkin Theater in 2010, having gone even further from the original source than Prikotenko: the applicant for the hand of Princess Calaf was equated with Prince Myshkin, and Turandot herself was equated with Nastasya Filippovna.

In Andrey Prikotenko’s performance, the guy in a leather jacket and boiled jeans performed by Nikita Khudyakov (he is indicated in the program not as Kalaf, but as the One whose name cannot be guessed) is also somewhat similar to Myshkin – like him, obviously not from this world. Not a bunker, that is. In an interview, Prikotenko said that in this performance he was based on the concept of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben about homo sacer, that is, a sacred person. Such a person can be killed without committing a crime with the universal tacit consent.

Calaf, who has lost his name, is ready to become a victim of sacred murder and comes to the palace to a woman who, in fact, is a serial killer. How many potential suitors are there who have not been able to solve her riddles, has she already killed? How many heads did you stake? In Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s great play “Princess Turandot” you somehow didn’t have to think about it – it’s a fairy tale, after all. But Turandot, performed by Vasilisa Perelygina, is a real devil in the flesh, it is not for nothing that she first appears on stage in a devil’s mask. However, then she will change her appearance countless times, and it is not clear where she is real. She grew up in a bunker, spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, and now her father has cancer – he is about to die, and she will have to lead the notorious kingdom of China. The very kingdom that kills. Is there love here?

The infinitely gloomy and pessimistic performance by Andrey Prikotenko, where endless jokes and gags cannot deceive the viewer, rhymes very much with his Serotonin (St. Only the middle-aged hero of the novel by Michel Houellebecq was gloomily waiting for the collapse of this world, locking himself in approximately the same bunker, and in Turandot this collapse had already happened. Of course, I would like to believe in the triumph of love, as in Vakhtangov, but Prikotenko, alas, does not leave us this hope.