“Life, I demand satisfaction!”
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So exclaims the hero of the play “Suicide” based on the play of the same name by Nikolai Erdman, the premiere of which was presented by director Pavel Safonov at the Vakhtangov Theater.
And then, for two and a half hours, Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikov (the wonderful role of Yuri Tsokurov) through clowning and props is looking for this very “satisfaction”.
Written in 1928, the play became objectionable and banned from staging, despite the high appreciation of Gorky and Lunacharsky. Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky addressed Stalin personally, but this did not help either. The work was considered “harmful and empty”. It was possible to see the scene of “The Suicide” only in 1982, when Valentin Pluchek staged the play at the Theater of Satire.
“I was attracted by the theme of the play – the clash of personality, human individuality with society, society. How can a person save himself in these circumstances? In the play there are specific signs of the time, everyday life, but this is a phantasmagoria. I thought about the words of Podsekalnikov, who is about to take his own life: “Man is a cage. And the soul languishes in this cage… But what if the cage is empty? If there is no soul? What then? Is there an afterlife or not? This is the main question that torments everyone, “What is it worth spending your life on, what to believe in?”. At the end of the play, there is an answer: one must live not for the sake of slogans, but to be free,” director Pavel Safonov says about his work on the production.
The protagonist of the play is Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikov. He does not work, lives in a communal apartment with his wife and mother-in-law. Having quarreled with his wife over liver sausage, the hero threatens to commit suicide and writes a suicide note: “I ask you not to blame anyone for death.” But the neighbors are trying to slip their text of the last letter to Podsekalnikov, pursuing personal goals – political, religious, love. So the life and death of Semyon Semyonovich turns into a farce with elements of horror.
The performance “Suicide” in Vakhtangov’s style is a tragicomedy, or rather, a tragic farce, with amazing lyrical and tragic monologues of the hero and grotesque pieces confirming the absurdity of everyday life. The viewer not only watches and listens, but also “participates” himself: he laughs, is horrified and even sheds tears from the realization of how unsightly our life is sometimes.
Professionally, sincerely and tragically, the hero of Yuri Tsokurov tries to “throw off” all this “ugliness” from himself and hear his own voice, and not “follow” other people’s slogans. There are a lot of people around with crazy ideas and theories, as well as opposition to the so-called “trends”. So why waste your life on all this?
At the beginning of the play, Podsekalnikov has completely fallen out of life, has lost its meaning and is in a neurotic state in which he rebels, trying to “pass” to another space. The hero gains strength, which attracts a crowd of ghost people to him. They flock to him like a fire, like a source of life, and this whole masquerade-clownery begins. But Podsekalnikov can no longer be stopped and dragged back into the “mink”, he feels that he is much stronger, freer than them and is able to live for his wife, for himself, for his pipe and not depend on all these “common” truths and extravagant ideas. By his way out of the “burrows” of life, the protagonist of the production shows the way for all of us.
“It seems to me that today, more than ever, the story of a person who does not fit into the general trend of what is happening in the world is relevant, a person who finds it difficult to preserve himself and understand why he lives, to understand what is important and what is superficial, external, where mass (as one of the characters says), and where is the personality. And of course, this play is about inner freedom, about the limits of this freedom, about the human soul, which is always outside of any ideas, religions, political movements, and so on,” director Pavel Safonov described the main idea of the production to journalists.
The following artists are helping Yuri Tsokurov to carry out the “exit”: Ekaterina Kramzina, Olga Tumaiknina / Svetlana Iosefiy, Vasily Simonov, Alexandra Streltsina, Oleg Makarov, Evgeny Kosyrev, Yuri Kraskov, Dmitry Solomykin, Artem Parkhomenko, Anna Antonova / Asya Domskaya, Maria Shastina, Karen Oveyan / Vasily Tsygantsov, Vitaly Ivanov.
“Erdman’s play is about a strange, broken world on the path of global change. At all times, the change in the world order, political, economic, territorial shifts, first of all, were reflected in the ordinary person. The country, time, orders, laws are changing, and some people cannot cope with this, they find themselves lost, unnecessary, doomed to survive, not to live. Human life has a short period, so little time is given, and a person is forced to adapt: to live where he is uncomfortable, to work where he does not like it, to drive himself into alien frameworks all the time, to change his essence. And this play is about this broken time, about these people – frightened, angry, offended by life and injustice, ”Yuri Tsokurov summed up the premiere.
Vladimir Sabadash.
Photo by Sergey Vinogradov
Message “Life, I demand satisfaction!” first appeared on Moscow truth.
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