“Lefty” from Makeevka: from national pride to inferiority complex

At the final “Lessons in Directing” festival, the Donetsk Youth Theater from Makeyevka, which is constantly under shelling in Donetsk, presented the play “Lefty”. The story by Nikolai Leskov, also called a skaz, and staged in Makeyevka four years before the Northern Military District, sounded bright from an artistic point of view, but there is no need to talk about its relevance. Especially considering that for five years now it has been heard from the side that is now called the new Russian territory.

However, the artists from Makeyevka begin Leskov’s tale with a recitation of Lermontov’s poem “Motherland.”

I love my fatherland, but with a strange love!

My reason will not defeat her.

Nor glory bought with blood,

Nor the peace full of proud trust.

Lermontov is read by a very short man with tousled red hair. “How is Lefty,” I thought. – Like Leskov, he’s “red-haired and cross-haired,” and not the fair-haired fellow, as the Tula gunsmith was usually portrayed in animation and musicals.

Nor the dark old treasured legends

No joyful dreams stir within me.

But I love – why, I don’t know…

The poetic overture, which was soon joined by other artists lined up in front of the viewer, promised serious literary theater in the popular spirit. But before the audience had time to humbly accept the proposed style, the overture made a sharp leap towards comedy, or rather farce with musical numbers. The production by Maxim Zhdanovich became like an animated popular print, began to play, but at the same time strictly followed the text of the writer whom Tolstoy called “the most Russian of Russian writers.” The artists easily and somehow desperately cheerfully handled the material, colorful, with amusing neologisms, stylized as folk speech. There was also a group of musicians to help, located on the left in the depths of the stage, which from beginning to end accompanied the story about the Tula Lefty and about the steel flea made in England, which he, small, and even with an oblique, shod.

The wooden platform, installed at an angle on the New Stage of Vakhtangov, actually alone represented a set, becoming either Europe, where the Russian Tsar Alexander I went, accompanied by the Cossack ataman Platov, or London, where he was shown a speck in a box. “This,” they answer, “is not a speck, but a nymphosoria.” – “Is she alive?” “No,” they answer, “not alive, but from pure English steel in the image of a flea we forged, and in the middle there is a factory and a spring. If you please turn the key, she’ll start dancing now.” The actress playing the role of the flea was tap-dancing, and others cheerfully joined her. Then England on the platform was replaced by the chambers of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I, under which Lefty and his comrades conjured an English invention, and closer to the end it was rocked by the raging sea with which Lefty returned to St. Petersburg.

Actors – Vadim Basalygin (Lefty), Evgeny Romanenko (Tsar), Maxim Zhdanovich (Ataman Platov), ​​Valery Mashoshin (Englishman), Valeria Arshinova (Flea) and others changed masks on the go, played easily, with passion. Lefty was touchingly trusting of everything, the Tsar was fabulously simple and naive, and the Englishman who showed him the steel flea was arrogant and, as befits a Briton, on his own mind.

The director maintained the popular print genre in everything: in the acting, in the scenic, more than modest, design (Alexander Grigorov), in the musical (Suren Harutyunyants). Instruments made from bottles and other improvised items added flavor to folk and classical instruments. The low-budget nature of a fairly large production (about twenty people on stage) was obvious. But one cannot say about her appearance, as in that joke about the Hermitage, where the oligarch went: “Clean, but poor.” On the contrary, the costumes looked decent and were cleverly designed. When theater director Vladislav Slukhaenko told me the budget for “The Flea” after the performance, it seemed that I had misheard – 250 (!!!) thousand rubles, and then I felt embarrassed for the productions of some capital theaters, which, in addition to budgets with six or seven zeros, cannot be said nothing.

And Leskov’s tale, written in 1881, and which was beaten on all sides by both liberals and patriots, sounded amazingly relevant, as if written yesterday: about the confrontation and eternal rivalry between Russia and Europe, about the always condescending and contemptuous attitude of the latter towards the former. And the self-abasement of a Russian person, even a rich and powerful one, at the sight of a foreigner, for whom we always have more respect than for a compatriot, even if he is Lefty, a pure genius. Which, in fact, is what we find at the end of the story of the red-haired and side-eyed master: upon his return from England, the skipper, with whom Lefty had been drinking on a dare, as a citizen of a foreign, albeit now unfriendly, state, was taken to a decent hospital, where he was given broth and care, and A left-hander, who has picked up a flea, goes to the common people’s Obukhovskaya, where “everyone of the unknown class is accepted to die.” So this Russian genius, before his death, did not curse his homeland and power, but asked the doctor to tell the Tsar the weapon secret of cleaning barrels: that, they say, “the British don’t clean their guns with bricks: let them not clean ours either, otherwise, God forbid war, they They’re not good for shooting.” Only, as is usual with us, these words were not conveyed to the tsar, but if they had been conveyed, “in the Crimea, in the war with the enemy, the turn of events would have been completely different.” In general, “I love Russia, but with a strange love”…

And the Donetsk Youth Theater is not working due to shelling in Makeyevka. Included in the “Grand Tour” program of the Russian Ministry of Culture, he travels around the country, showing his performances.