Grymov invited the leading artist of the Viktyuk Theater to play the role of Leonardo

The literary basis of “Leonardo” is the same as in the first part of the triptych – “Peter I”, – Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s trilogy “Christ and Antichrist”, which Grymov deliberately swapped. The performance begins with what usually ends – a closing curtain, which makes it clear to the public: the performance is over. Although everything is just beginning, and rather harshly at that: on the stage there is an atmosphere of triumphant gloom, magnificently discharged and rude, with geniuses and freaks. An ugly hunchback with a distorted face will turn out, for a moment, to be the Duke of Milan Moreau, Leonardo’s main customer, around whom, as in a bad dream, Siamese twins, lush-haired and busty ladies, guards and God knows who else are dancing. Grymov, who assures that in recent years he has been engaged only in theater, will not avoid the framing of mise-en-scenes, close-ups that designate the participants in events, elevating them into symbols – power, goodness, evil, witchcraft, rise and fall.

Such a set of mise-en-scene is very effective, and if we add to it the works of Renaissance artists that materialize on the stage and even above the hall, a musical sequence that not only supports, but aggravates the visual series, then we can say that Grymov is sculpting his theatrical fresco. The fresco is very close to the era both in spirit and design. And where historical authenticity competes with artistic generalizations. And this is very intriguing.

Of course, in such an ambitious production, the figure of the protagonist decides a lot. The leading actor of the Roman Viktyuk theater Dmitry Bozin was invited to play the role of Leonardo. His appearance in itself looks picturesque: slender, perfectly built, as if from an atlas of anatomy, he comes out half-naked from the right wings with the appearance of a deity – a worthy student of Roman Viktyuk. Bozin will lead his Leonardo through the entire first act really as an exotic celestial, kindly condescending to a close and distant circle. And the striking contrast of the image in the second act – the deity descended to the ground, where dirt, pain, feelings are different. Take out the saints. The change in the image is the result of reincarnation, where the external plasticity of the Actor gives way to the internal.

Perhaps this was Leonardo, whose portraits were practically not preserved – one drawing, and even that one is unreliable. Against the background of his divine state, selfish and estranged from everything earthly (“If you are flying to the stars, don’t turn around”), his environment looks quite earthy – the students of Giovanni and Cesare in the exact performance of Bogdan Shchukin and Alexander Serikov. I must say that these artists are revealed from one production to another. In “Leonardo” in the role of the wife of Duke Moreau, the star of the Theater in the South-West Zhanna Chirva made her debut, who joined the troupe “Modern”. And the duke is brilliantly played by Yuri Anpilogov, in the first part of the triptych he is Tsar Peter.

Looking at this multi-layered performance, where, as if in a whirlwind, the beautiful and the ugly, the Italian and even the Russian are intertwined, you constantly catch yourself thinking – since we are talking about historical figures, what is the proportion of authenticity and fiction in Grymov, who relies on Merezhkovsky? Was Leonardo like that? To what extent is there a Russian trace in this story in the form of the appearance of icon painters who arrived in Italy and were shocked by the sight of the Sistine Chapel? We are talking about this with director Yuri Grymov after the performance.

“Today, it is especially important to talk about history and about a specific historical figure, in this case, Leonardo da Vinci. To what extent did you adhere to the authenticity in creating his image and the Renaissance in general?

– I also guarantee the reliability of the facts for 99 percent, if at all something can be guaranteed in history. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything related to the Renaissance. I have been painting since the age of 12 and was immersed in this era. Much, if not all, I read about Leonardo and Michelangelo. Now I myself am preparing the book “Leonardo da Vinci is my friend.” As well as several lectures on the Renaissance, which I will read at the Modern Theater.

If “Peter I” is a conversation about how you can serve Christ under the banner of the Antichrist, then in “Leonardo” my question is different – how can you combine the Antichrist and Christ 50 to 50. But at the same time, I generalize the concept of an artist, not I am running after age certainty, deliberately not growing a beard for Dmitry Bozin, who plays Leonardo. And next to him is the Duke of Milan Moreau, for me he is the personification of the customer. An artist does not exist without an order. And the illusion that an artist should be free was invented relatively recently. For example, thanks to the most militant pope – Julius II – the Sistine Chapel appeared and much more.

There are many portraits of Michelangelo left in history and only one drawing depicting Leonardo, and that one is unreliable. It is known that he was good-looking and in his treatise The Atlantic Code he wrote that an artist must be a handsome person. Leonardo was really well built and did not understand how it was possible to be ugly, such as, for example, Michelangelo. He did not wash or rarely washed, walked in the dust from marble chips. But, by the way, Michelangelo was never a greedy person, as shown in Konchalovsky’s film “Sin”. I have Leonardo walking in colored scarves, orange, blue, and this is not an invention of the artist Iren Belousova, but a historical fact – he liked to dress brightly.

My Michelangelo is caustic, rude, from a good family, with a good education, a maximalist, who got a face all over the place for his truthfulness. He is the absolute antipode of Leonardo and Raphael. After all, Leonardo gave his drawings of the fortification of Florence, for which Michelangelo called him a traitor. “You gave the drawings to the enemy.”

“Genius cannot be defined and weighed. Genius does not mean a good person. What is Leonardo for you?

– Leonardo was a genius who incinerated everything that was near him. Not in the sense that he was a sadist, a monster, but his energy and purposefulness turned into a negative for the environment. For me, his troubles about love and friendship are incomprehensible: he does not have one hundred percent mention of where he was and with whom he was. Therefore, his student Salai appears next to him, who, like other students of Leonardo, remained good artists in history. But it is Salai that is present in about 70 percent of Leonardo’s paintings: he is in the form of Bacchus, John the Baptist.

– This Salai… I didn’t quite understand – is he Leonardo’s lover or just the artist’s lap dog?

– Rather, the student is like a lap dog. But this “dog” repeatedly stole money from Leonardo, which he himself wrote about. Nevertheless, the teacher spoiled him, decorated him and treated him like a beloved, but … dog. And, oddly enough, Leonardo bequeathed his entire inheritance to him, and not to other students. After all, the first time “La Gioconda” was at Salai, and he was the first to sell it. Salai and Leonardo are androgynes, that is, when a person is without a sex, not a man, not a woman.

– If you still strived for the external similarity of artists with historical characters in male images, then the actress playing the role of Gioconda is blonde and in general … Why?

– For me, in Mona Lisa, the image of the only woman who turned out to be interesting to Leonardo was more important. He became close to her while he painted a portrait for several years, and was very upset by her death. At first, I even wanted to do a casting to find an actress who looked like Mona Lisa, but then I abandoned this idea. The only one who is practically a copy of the original is our artist Evgeny Kazak, who plays Raphael – just his double. And the Duke of Moreau is far from the “original”: I made him a hump, pulled off his eye and lower lip, because Leonardo admired ugliness. Theater is the art of generalization, so in the performance I try to generalize and show the terrible period of the Middle Ages – the plague, syphilis, tough relationships between people … And at the same time the light that comes from the great works of Leonardo.