In the anniversary season, the theater “At the Nikitsky Gate” will present an anti-fascist performance

The theater “At the Nikitsky Gates” hosted a meeting of the troupe, dedicated to the beginning of the new season. And this meeting could be considered working, if not for two circumstances: firstly, in March next year, the Mark Rozovsky Theater will turn forty years old, and secondly, the famous director and his colleagues will present seven premieres to the audience in the 2022/23 season at once . The day before, we talked with Mark Rozovsky about the timeless classics and the space of the theater, which, like air, needs freedom, not supervision.

– Mark Grigoryevich, we congratulate you on the anniversary of the theater and the award to you personally of the Theater Prize “MK” in the nomination “Master”.

– Thanks. For me, four decades hitting one point, this is an important date, the moment of “acme”: the time to reach maturity and some kind of summing up. Or, if you like, the moment of “lynching”.

– Looking back, admit – then, in the spring of 1983, did you believe in such a long history of your offspring?

“We were one of the first theaters to work on a full cost basis, that is, we did not receive a single ruble of subsidies from the state. We arose from nothing, we are “children of perestroika”, a theater that started from scratch, and by the way, I am not an appointee. When we were born, many did not believe that we would survive in the new conditions, but we exist. What else can be added to this? If before we worked with dumbbells, now we lift barbells. Our performances have become more weighty, some of them seem unbearable – for example, “The Three Musketeers”, where two groups of thirty people play and colossal scenery is used.

– And how many performances did the theater play during these four decades?

— More than 15 thousand! This is, of course, an approximate figure. We have had over one and a half million viewers! This number is comparable to the population of a large Russian city. 176 titles have been released, now seven more are in the works, and we do not have one-day titles. “Doctor Chekhov”, with which it all began in the 83rd, is still going on. And the novelties coexist with performances – “long-lived”: “Poor Lisa”, “History of a Horse”, “A Novel About Girls” based on the prose of Vladimir Vysotsky, “Gambrinus” based on Kuprin. They go for 30-35 years! The same open-air performance “Songs of Our Yard” ran for 27 seasons, and with it we are opening a new one.

– Reveal the cards – what awaits the audience.

– On our main, New Stage, the nearest performance is “Transfiguration”, my play, written during the covid period, it is dedicated to the poets of the Silver Age, their fates: Valery Bryusov, Andrei Bely, Nina Petrovskaya and the character whom I call Mask. I ended up with a tragicomic phantasmagoria on a documentary basis – something that I love very much in the theater.

The second premiere is “Swallow a Boa Constrictor”, where the anti-fascist theme sounds. This play is staged by two young directors: Rodion Vyushkin and Sergey Uustalu, wonderful guys. A little later we will show the play “Mikha” – I dedicated it to the story of the Jewish director and actor Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels. But the main work, probably, should be recognized as the play “Don Quixote” by Bulgakov. I decided last year that it would become a “nail”, so we will present this performance on the same day with the fortieth anniversary of the theater – March 27, 2023. There will also be “Kashtanka” (Maxim Dunaevsky agreed to write the music for this production) and a restored version of the performance “Be Healthy, Schoolboy”, the plot of which is based on Bulat Okudzhava’s prose about Soviet soldiers who fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.

There will also be a separate repertoire on the Old Stage, like, say, a one-man show based on the work of the American playwright George Brant “Detached” and a comedy by Yasmina Reza, called “Tooth for a Tooth” in the director’s interpretation of my student Victoria Dotsenko.

– Do you plan to continue the series of poetic productions “Tape of Poetry”?

– Yes, Brodsky will be released in the fall, Mayakovsky will be released in March, I will personally perform there, and Sasha Cherny is planned for May-June 2023. But in general, I want to say that the space of the theater today is becoming multipolar – in the theatrical sense, of course. Gradually, we all come to the realization that there are different theaters in Russia, and this is better than a single style and language. By the way, we have been defending the multipolarity that I am talking about for 40 years, creating a multi-style and multi-lingual repertoire. And yes, we focused on the classics of Russian dramaturgy and directing – Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Mikhail Chekhov, Tovstonogov … These approaches are very close to my personal understanding of the theatrical mission.

– To be in demand and timely, what should the theater be like?

– Alive, responding to all the problems of modern life. I emphasize: we are not afraid of any topics, my civic position is in my performances. I’m not going to manifest anything, shout out, prove anything; the artist should have the only opportunity – to speak freely. We have this freedom, it is guaranteed to us by the Constitution, we live in an uncensored space. And we don’t need any public advice! We responsibly deal with our theatrical business, we have an audience – this is our people, and we trust them. And the people expect from us works of great art based on Russian culture, which is part of world culture.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28844 dated August 11, 2022

Newspaper headline:
Mark Rozovsky: “The theater started from scratch, and I’m not an appointee”