In the “Workshop of Pyotr Fomenko” Gogol’s “Marriage” was turned into a “Completely Incredible Event”

The title of the new play “Pyotr Fomenko Workshop” is all capital letters. Evgeny Kamenkovich staged “A Completely Incredible Event” based on Gogol’s “Marriage” in the original stage version, crossing Nikolai Vasilyevich with Alexander Sergeevich and slightly modernizing the text. The overstaying bride Agafya Tikhonovna was played by Olga Bodrova, who returned to the theater after the birth of her daughter.

The authors of the play were interested in a historical fact: Gogol’s play was published two years after the appearance of the first photographic studio, the capabilities of which were “absolutely incredibly” exaggerated, which set the bizarre course of events. The house of the late merchant Kuperdyagin turned into a fashionable and still outlandish establishment. For set designer Irina Korina, the Kuperdyagins’ Photo Studio is a symbol of the great illusion. Nothing may happen in life, no matter how much you dream, but something unprecedented remains forever on the pages of a photo album.

Each of the contenders for the hand and heart of the merchant’s daughter Agafya Tikhonovna is photographed against the background of masterpieces of Italian architecture, so beloved by Gogol, and the bride has the opportunity to carefully examine each of them. On the stage there is a whole collection of mobile screens on wheels with full-length daguerreotype portraits of grooms. Photographer Ivan Mikhailovsky photographed the actors in the surroundings of the era especially for the performance. They even roll out a balcony on wheels, and Agafya Tikhonovna looks like Juliet on it.

In a photo studio, you can stick your head into a tantamarescue and take a photo in someone else’s body, pose while swinging on a swing, or against the backdrop of a balustrade and a flowerpot with artificial flowers, creating the illusion of being by the sea. History knows precedents when intellectuals published their sea photographs, but never visited the coast, and we are now looking at their photographs, trying to understand the essence of the substitutions and fictitious biography.

In addition to the photo studio, Agafya Tikhonovna inherited a wedding salon from her dad, as evidenced by the sign. In a word, she has a complete set for arranging a wedding. And the bride is fresh, vigorous, and the matchmaker has gone overboard, and the grooms are swirling. Until the age of 27, the beauty remained a girl. It’s time to make a choice. Agafya Kuperdyagina, performed by Olga Bodrova, has her soul wide open and her eyes wide open. She is kind and innocent, ready to accept and love anyone. He finds something attractive in every groom, no matter how monster he may be. She even agrees to bear the surname Yaichnitsa, because this same Yaichnitsa seems to her to be a prominent gentleman. And the suitors are each more wonderful than the other, but the stakes are high. Give them a bride with a dowry who can speak French.

And she really wants noble happiness. She does not want to marry the merchant. Almost from the very beginning, Agafya Tikhonovna was in a white wedding dress – strange, square. Waiting for the right moment. Costume designer Maria Borovskaya dressed her in something incomprehensible, as if to hide the features of her figure. Someone will think that for the sake of an actress who has just returned to the stage after the birth of a child. But no, Olga Bodrova is still as slim as before. There will be an opportunity to verify this later.

A portrait of Gogol appears on the stage, at which the kneeling Ilya Fomich Kochkarev, the restless friend of Podkolesin’s groom, looks at him as if at an icon. There are many wonders and trifles in the performance that make up the general chaos, a progressive movement towards the illusory happiness of one’s neighbor. A la a crystal chandelier that is being taken out, a la a granite lion, as if from the banks of the Neva, read like a greeting to Dmitry Krymov’s play “Mozart” that untimely left the repertoire. “Don Juan”. Dress rehearsal”. There are many greetings here, including to Pushkin. What would it be like without him?

Alexander Sergeevich gives signals all the time. Whether the authors of the play strived for this or whether it happened against their will does not really matter. Who, if not Pushkin, generously shared ideas, encouraged Gogol to create “The Government Inspector” and “Dead Souls”, and his poems are heard in the play. Evgeny Kamenkovich, anticipating the release of the play, recalled that there is reason to believe that Pushkin did not read “The Marriage,” although Gogol sent him the manuscript. This is evidenced by his letter to Alexander Sergeevich, in which he asks to return the copy, adding: “if you don’t need it.” Gogol admitted that “he never wrote a single line without imagining it in front of him.”

Yuri Butorin plays the curly-haired and restless Kochkarev, dressed in a red lionfish cape in the fashion of Pushkin’s time, as if he were Pushkin. He can no longer stop in his intention to marry his friend, taking away bread from the professional matchmaker Fekla Ivanovna, played at crazy speed by Marlene Dzhabrailova. He is ready to bring Ivan Kuzmich Podkolesin to the crown at any cost, and not that for him this is a matter of honor. It’s just that Alexander Sergeevich almost got carried away.

Uptight, cocoon-like and permanently not ready for marriage, Podkolesin is played by Ivan Vakulenko. He climbs onto half of the horse, and in front of us is “The Bronze Horseman” – another greeting to Pushkin. A la granite lion becomes a bed for Podkolesin to take a nap on, like on a sofa. The life of an eternal groom is amazing in its own way. And the window for escape will be a gift from heaven – he will be lowered from the grate as a temptation.

Podkolesin’s servant Stepan is played by the young actor Boris Yanovsky, whom we will hear about later. On the course of Evgeniy Kamenkovich and Dmitry Krymov at GITIS, he played in Podkolesin’s “Marriage”, and now he is very good in the role of Stepan, who spills like honey. Dunyashka is a girl in the Kuperdyagins’ house – a nimble girl who takes photographs of Agafya Tikhonovna’s grooms at the bride’s party, scurrying around the rooms, creating the illusion of an all-encompassing pre-wedding commotion. She was played by Ekaterina Novokreshchenova, also from the new conscription, a graduate of the Kamenkovich and Krymov workshop in 2023. The whirlwind of events is an all-consuming moloch, and it is impossible to avoid it. Everything was decided without us.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29219 dated February 19, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Noble happiness of Olga Bodrova