Lensky’s broom and Onegin’s drunkenness: the production of the Perm Opera House made the audience giggle

The Perm Opera Theater brought the opera Eugene Onegin to the Golden Mask festival. The production by Vladislavs Nastavshevs (director and stage designer) and Mikhail Tatarnikov (conductor) was nominated for the award as the best performance, as well as in several private nominations. Such a high recognition by the experts of the award is absolutely logical: the performance is a vivid example of the aesthetic and ideological needs of the festival.

The motivation of Nastavshevs, who decided to stage “Onegin” today, is absolutely understandable: well, everyone is tired of this annoying, sore mouth, sickened worse than the bitter radish of an opera hit. How many tears can be shed over the “early urn” and “miserable lot”? Of course, this Russian opera needs a radical upgrade – this is what the Latvian director Vladislavs Nastavshevs decided and turned to the playwright Dmitry Renansky. However, it does not matter who turned to whom. It is important that the playwright in a classical opera performance is the same person who helps the director to give new actual meanings to the masterpiece.

The meanings are as follows. The title character (Konstantin Suchkov), shabby, shabby, drunk, smoking electronic cigarettes one after another, has been toiling on a sagging sofa in a “killed” room with a collapsed ceiling, an obliquely hanging chandelier for many years (from the first minute it is clear that in the final it will be lying on the floor) and a broken piano.

There is no narrative: all the events – both the acquaintance with the Larins, and Tatyana’s feelings like “why did you come to our collective farm, why did you disturb my peace”, and the stupid lapel given to the cute girl, and the bloody quarrel with Lensky – all this has already happened, turning into obsessive memories of Onegin, from which he is not able to get rid of.

The director borrowed from his teacher Lev Dodin from his ancient and, alas, failed production of The Queen of Spades, where the equally shabby Herman was sitting in the same place on the stage on a bed in the Obukhov hospital, and the plot, with the support of convulsions of mimams, developed in his muddy mind without any logic or meaning. It must be admitted that here everything turned out much more logically. The ghostly characters sitting in Onegin’s sick head are also clearly tormented to play their roles endlessly – both in Tchaikovsky’s opera and in the mental performance of the hero. They are irritated, they perform their functions reluctantly, out of duty, with obvious discontent: how much can you do, Onegin? How many times will you drag us out with your crippled brain to repeat this “Groundhog Day” for you?

It looks very funny and causes chuckles in the audience. Which, without a doubt, is the key goal of the authors: to chuckle at Tchaikovsky’s score is just a sacred thing.

To activate the giggly secretion in the body of the audience, the director uses proven means of performative directing: the artists flap books like wings, push each other (this works especially well during the performance of arias). The audience is terribly happy when Onegin pushes Tatyana (Daria Pichugina) off the sofa.

But the most superb find is the dried brooms of grave bouquets, with which the heroes shake, prick their partners in the stomach and brush off each other. Lensky (Alexander Chernov) succeeds best in this: after all, these are bouquets from his grave. Because he is dead, as is clear from this directorial paradigm, from the very first minute. And when at the end of the fourth scene (a ball and a challenge to a duel) Onegin obviously kills him for everyone, without waiting for a duel, the thought arises: will there be a fifth scene? And why would she? Lensky has already been killed.

Well, it’s not for the same reason that she is needed to listen to this unbearable aria “What does the coming day prepare for me?”. Hasn’t everyone heard it a hundred times already? Moreover, the banknotes have already been shown to us: all choral scenes have been removed from the first picture, and subsequent choirs sound somewhere behind the stage. And rightly so – poor Onegin even has these five characters in his head, and then let’s bring the chorus. In short, the fifth picture did take place. But not for Aria, of course. And for fun: when the drunk Onegin appears at the place of the duel, he presents his “second” – a bottle of wine with comments: although he is an unknown person, but, of course, an honest fellow … The audience, naturally, giggles.

The authors nevertheless transferred the two final scenes to the narrative mode – and immediately lost the wine degree set by Onegin’s “second”. The scene with Gremin (Vladimir Taysaev) and the crimson beret was static and boring. The final duet turned out to be banal and there was even nothing to chuckle about, and the final remark – about “shame and longing” – was played by Onegin on stage against the background of Lensky’s corpse lying under the grave brooms for the surviving characters sitting on the chairs. From which one could conclude: after all, Onegin is not Onegin. And the opera artist, who is tired of singing this opera, which it is time to dispose of. Well, or somehow upgrade.

It should be said about the music, probably. Because among the nominees and maestro Tatarnikov, who tried to support the director’s gags with orchestral ones – such as eccentric accents, unexpected caesuras and unusual tempo accelerations and decelerations. And such trifles as the discrepancy between the choir and the orchestra are nothing, of course. The choirs could even be included in the recording – you still can’t see them.

I will not say anything about the nominee soloists. Singers are gentle people. You write something about false intonation, short breathing, singing on the cords – they will take it and completely lose their voice. So what about the singers is either good or nothing.

In general, I would like to praise the directors for this work – after all, an upgrade is better than disposal. But one should also reproach a little: they did not hold out, they did not give a real kick to this score. And the audience is waiting! Well, for example, the arioso, in which Onegin “rejects” Tatyana, the artist sings while shaving. That is, he stands at the mirror, shaves and sings: “Learn to rule yourself.” The audience giggles. But how the scene would have played if Onegin had been sitting on the toilet at that time! How would meanings grow …

However, everything is ahead. There is room to grow.