In the Pskov Theater, Bulgakov was placed in a magic lantern

Anton Fedorov’s second performance this season was shown at the Golden Mask festival. After staged by him in the Voronezh chamber theater “Child” – “Morphine” in the Pskov Drama Theater. The two-hour action is announced as “a passage in one action based on the stories of Mikhail Bulgakov.”

The author of the staging was Anton Fedorov himself, presented in all faces – as a director, production designer, costume designer. The play is based on Notes of a Young Doctor, the story Morphine, quotes from The Heart of a Dog and The Master and Margarita. Paramedic Anna Nikolaevna, for example, mentions Annushka, who spilled oil.

It seems that the action takes place inside a magic lantern, behind the glasses of which a blizzard has cleared up, a fabulous winter landscape appears. The effect is enhanced if you watch the performance from the back rows of the stalls. That’s when a complete illusion of something unearthly is born. Fedorov, like Greenway, creates bizarre, bewitching pictures, valuable in themselves, hypnotizes, provokes. It must be that morphine has such an effect on the heroes that fantastic pictures are born in their heads. An unusual effect was achieved with the help of lighting designer Igor Fomin, a high-class staff specialist at the Alexandrinsky Theatre.

It’s blowing outside the window. It sweeps, according to the author’s intention, and in the heads, mainly in them. It is only necessary to decide on the choice of the path – to fall into oblivion, fall into the abyss and thereby go into your own world, or not sit idly by, do business, save others and thereby yourself.

As the starting point, as the authors declare, they took animation as a way of acting existence, a mask that does not completely deprive the actors of psychologism, newsreels and much more. At rehearsals, they appealed to the 1902 silent film Journey to the Moon by Georges Méliès, the paintings of Charlie Chaplin, the films of the Lumiere brothers, and even Yuri Norshtein’s The Hedgehog in the Fog, which is deeper than what it might seem at a cursory glance.

Two doctors – one nameless (actor Alexander Ovcharenko), just the Doctor from “Notes of a Young Doctor”, the second – Sergey Polyakov (Camille Hardin) from “Morphine”. Almost twins. One is a reflection of the other. Both are young, still recent students who have fallen into the wilderness. They learn in practice through trial and error medical science. The Doctor seems to be constantly standing behind the back of Polyakov, from whom the diary remains. While one is dreaming half asleep thanks to morphine, he goes into oblivion for a while, where the damned questions about how to live and overcome a nightmare are no longer tormented, the second saves other people’s lives and thereby his own life. There are 900 people in line for one, zero patients for the other. Surgical operations are a real theater, by no means anatomical.

Inside the lantern there is an old leather sofa, just like Chekhov’s respected closet, a character in itself. Because of it, wolf heads stick out. On the right is an ordinary door, but vivid images of Egon Schiele, who died from an epidemic, appear on it. From time to time they become a reality, if you can call it what is happening inside the lantern, and a foot will be brought onto the stage, approximately the same as in one of his paintings. A toy trio is rushing down the proscenium towards the audience, controlled by the hero sitting on the couch. You can’t tell right away whether it’s a dog team, or a pack of wolves, or wooden rocking horses for kids. Looks very impressive.

The characters move at speed, like on an old film, that’s why the illusion of a doll’s house appears. They, like puppets, swing their arms and legs, twitch their shoulders. Anton Fedorov has a special relationship with dolls. At the end of The Child, he arranged something like a music hall, where everyone, like on a conveyor belt, gives birth to baby dolls. In “Ivan’s Childhood”, staged at the Kazan Youth Theater and presented at the “Golden Mask” a year ago, there is a puppet on the stage – a copy of Ivan, as Nikolai Burlyaev played him in the film of the same name by Tarkovsky. Even if the doll is not spiritualized, which it should ideally be, there is still an effect. The characters express themselves in interjections, switch to bird language. Like Agnes in The Child, one of the characters in Morphia endlessly repeats “aha, aha.” It turns out nice, but it works for a single viewer only once, provided that he is present at Anton Fedorov’s performance for the first time.

The blizzard doesn’t stop. If not outside the magic lantern, then certainly in the minds, giving the right to choose – to fall, to escape, or simply go into unconsciousness, into internal emigration, as they often say now.