Igor Kostolevsky: “Goncharov took me to the theater and did not kick me out”

FROM THE DOSIER “MK”

For 100 years, the Theater House on the corner of Bolshaya Nikitskaya and Maly Kislovsky Lane has changed its name several times. From 1922 to 1943 it was the Theater of the Revolution, from 1943 to 1954 it was the Moscow Drama Theatre, and in 1954 it became the Moscow Theater named after Vl. Mayakovsky, in whose name in 1964 the title “academic” was added. In the early years, the theater was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Further, the directors who determined the fate and important stages of its development were Alexei Popov, Nikolai Okhlopkov, Andrei Goncharov, Sergei Artsybashev, Mindaugas Karbauskis. Since May 2022, Yegor Peregudov has become artistic director.

one. The first poster of the first performance “Night” directed by Alexander Velizhev based on the play by Marcel Martinet. The premiere took place on October 29, 1922.

2. Performance by Nikolai Okhlopkov “Medea”. It was played in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall (formerly the Meyerhold Theatre). After all, I ran a warrior in it in the crowd. The performance was monumental, loud. Evgenia Kozyreva played Medea, and the role of the king was Karp Mukasyan. And somehow on tour we drank. A scene comes up when we have to carry Karp on a stretcher, and Tolya Mikheev, who was also a warrior, asks Karp: “Can you explain why I, drunk, should carry you sober?” In short, with these stretchers we almost ran along Kozyreva, who was lying on the stage. Then there was a wild scandal.

3. Evgeny Pavlovich Leonov. My God… I studied at Goncharov’s course, and somehow he invited us, first-year students, to his play “Vanyushin’s Children”. We came, and this performance of his turned out to be one of my strongest theatrical impressions. I remember every scene, and how touching Evgeny Pavlovich was there …

He and Sasha Lazarev rehearsed the musical “The Man from La Mancha”, and the whole theater gathered for their rehearsals – there is no such thing anymore, apparently, there is nothing to watch. And so I was walking along the corridor, and Evgeny Pavlovich met me, he had just left the stage. He saw me (although we did not know him and did not communicate), he said: “Come on, dove, come here.” We went into the rest room, and in all seriousness he asked me: “Well, is it bad?” I was completely numb: “What’s wrong? What? ..” “Yes, bad, bad,” he waved his hand and left. And then it opened up for me: how can such a great artist doubt himself? Well, an absolute child. And then I observed such childishness in great artists – Alexei Batalov, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, the same Misha Kozakov, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan and Oleg Borisov. At some point they were absolute children.

Then, together with Yevgeny Pavlovich, we filmed a lot, and lived nearby on Frunzenskaya, on Komsomolsky Prospekt, went to the same Okean store, which is no longer there. We had a friend of the director there, who weighed scarce fish for us in the basement, and then we drank vodka with him, and ate fish.

four. In “The Man from La Mancha” we ran in the crowd, and there I saw Sasha Lazarev. He was my idol, I liked him so much, and I wanted to be like him so much that one day I went up to Sasha Fatyushin and said: “Sasha, I will quietly stand next to Lazarev in the scene, and you look which of us is taller.” He came, stood and left. “Sash, how are you?” I ask later. “Well, what do you say, Crutch? You are longer, and he is taller.

But in a serious way, we met with him in Tatyana Akhramkova’s play “Kin IV”, where I was supposed to play the king of England, and Sasha – the great actor Keane. And Goncharov was unhappy that I was filming at that time in some series and that because of me I had to postpone rehearsals. But then Lazarev said: “I won’t play without Igor” – and he waited for me for eight months. I will remember this all my life.

5. Maria Babanova. Here I am in her dressing room. This is her mirror, it has remained so here. I saw her in the “Old Fashioned Comedy”, she played with Uncle Volodya Samoilov. But we did not communicate with her in any way: she and that generation were celestials for us. Everyone in the theater walked on tiptoe, there was complete silence behind the stage … In old age it was already hard for her to play, but her voice, her crystal voice remained the same.

6. The play “Look who has come!”, And it is a milestone in my life. I’m 27 years old here, and this is my first big role. Thanks to her, I declared myself as an artist, because before that for 10 years I ran in crowd scenes and acted in films. And when all of Moscow recognized me (there were already “Tehran-43”, “Star of Captivating Happiness”), I still continued to run in the crowd.

Interestingly, my great teacher Andrei Alexandrovich Goncharov dissuaded the director Boris Morozov from taking me on this role. True, he later apologized, said: “I didn’t think that you could handle it, I didn’t want to injure you.” The role was really given extremely difficult, and no one believed that I would play it, I could. In the eyes of most of my colleagues, I was a handsome handsome man, and no one took into account my rich inner world. I remember that I really wanted to tap dance at this performance. Why the hell – I still don’t understand, but I wanted to. And Morozov then said: “Do you want to tap dance? Let’s!” And the choreographer Gena Abramov and I spent three months hammering this tap dance. And then the runs came, and the tap dance did not work for me. Then Morozov says to me: “When I tell you” beat “- start.” And I fucked up. Pause. “Fucked off?” Borya asks. “Fucked off.” “So, don’t ever do that again.” As a director, he did absolutely the right thing.

And Zhenya Simonova … a wonderful partner. We played a lot with her. On her anniversary, I said: “In my theatrical fate, you played a very unseemly role. In our very first performance – “The Seagull”, where you are Nina Zarechnaya, I shot myself because of you. In “Look Who’s Coming!” I broke my arm because of you. In “Marriage” because of you, I jumped out the window. Well, in the “Nora” you left me without a penny of money and generally left. She is wonderful and great, a wonderful actress.

7. Andrey Goncharov. Great director and teacher. I am grateful to him for two things: that he took me to the theater and that he did not kick me out. But what I noticed: the older I get, the more I remember him and think: “What would he say, how would he do this role? ..” We had different periods, but I am grateful for the school of life that he went through.

eight. Natasha Gundareva, Olechka Prokofieva in the play “The Victim of the Century”. But I remember Olechka very well in Seryozha Yashin’s play “Tomorrow there was a war”, where she played a fantastic teacher. And Natasha and I came to the theater together, and she immediately declared herself. Somehow, she and Zhenya Simonova and I went to Israel to see the play “The Pose of an Emigrant”, we played it together with the artists of the local theater “NOha. And here is the first performance, and Natasha is ill, and so much so that she cannot get up. The doctors arrived, did something… But at the last moment she suddenly gets up and says: “No, I will play.”

And she had an episode, but when she came out, we all stopped playing, because it was a cascade of improvisation, knowledge of the text – I had not seen this before with anyone. In short, she played, she was taken to a hotel, and then I went all night to check if everything was in order with her (our rooms were opposite each other). But Natasha only asked for one thing: “Don’t say anything to Misha” (Mikhail Filippov, Gundareva’s husband, theater actor. — M.R.).

9. How Armen played has always been a mystery to me. When I was a student for the first time I watched “A tram” Desire “with him and with Sveta Nemolyaeva, I went backstage and, running up to him, blurted out:” How do you play !!! – And running. Then, years later, he and I came to Paris to shoot in Tehran-43. Both are in Paris for the first time, and there is a very strong Armenian diaspora. And he had a friend, his name was Gregor, and this local Gregor showed us evening Paris, introduced us to people, we were at his house. And when the shooting was coming to an end, we went with him to a restaurant in Montmartre. I will never forget the face of Armen – the face of an admiring child for whom a star was discovered or something like that. Both were silent and only looked at each other completely stunned.

ten. Misha, Mikhail Ivanovich Filippov. Performance “Kant”. We really played a lot with him and even arranged a festival of our three performances. We are like an old family that had everything. Somehow with the performance “Art” they moved from St. Petersburg to Tallinn. Night train, coupe. They said something to each other and started laughing – for forty minutes they could not stop. It was the happy laugh of some young, full of strength people who have their whole lives ahead of them. And the same thing happened when Kant and I arrived in Tyva: we were attacked by laughter at the local lake. True, later this was explained by the fact that hemp grew around the lake. Yes, there were roles, yes, they were partners, but for some reason this is remembered.

eleven. With Sveta Nemolyaeva we are like relatives: in “Relatives” she was my lover, in the play “The Long-awaited” – my mother, in “Running” – again my lover. I still appreciate the irony and self-irony in it, which is rare for artists. Now we are playing with her in Fruits of Enlightenment, in Kant. I remember the tour in Novosibirsk, the first for me, and Sveta and Sasha invited me to visit them. And Sasha then said: “Listen, call me Sasha, I beg you.”

12. This is a play by Seryozha Artsybashev “Marriage”. When it was played at Pokrovka, it was gentle, poignant, and about how everything works in Russia: everyone wants to be happy, and it doesn’t work. And they seem to be ready for happiness, but at the last moment something collapses, and someone jumps out the window. I am grateful to Seryozha, and what happened to him in our theater, I consider him a personal tragedy. After all, the theater was opened for him: everyone accepted him, he made three very good performances – “The Marriage”, “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Dead Souls”. And I am bitter that the circumstances were such that forced him to leave.

13. These guys are the last issue of Mindaugas Karbauskis. Great youth. I really like them: intelligent, well-trained, many of them are already acting in performances. An absolutely grandiose artist Stas Kardashev: in “The Elder Son” he plays my son Vasenka wonderfully, and I see how he grows from performance to performance, but all the time he is dissatisfied with himself. And the other guys are good.