Love with a Polish accent

In the Chamber Hall of the Simonovskaya Stage, the premiere of the graduation performance of the Theater Institute named after. Shchukin based on the plays by Leonid Zorin “Warsaw Melody” and “Crossroads”.

Stage version and production by Vladimir Ivanov – director of the Theater. Evg. Vakhtangov, professor of “Pike”. Together with the director, Tatyana Zakhava (director-teacher), Maxim Obrezkov (scenography and costumes), Vyacheslav Zhukov (musical arrangement), Olga Kalyavina (make-up artist) worked on the release of the play. This year’s graduates (head of the course – Anna Leonardovna Dubrovskaya) – Polina Rafeeva and Ivan Zakhava – are playing in the performance.

For novice artists, this is not the first time on the Vakhtangov stage. Their debut on the Main Stage took place in 2020 in the play “Puss in Boots” (staged by V. V. Ivanov), where Ivan Zakhava (great-grandson of one of the brightest students and successors of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Boris Zakhava) played the Robber, and Polina Rafeeva – A bird, and this season she played the role of Denise in the play “Mademoiselle Nitush” and Anechka in the premiere performance of “The General and His Family.”

The performance that this wonderful team presented is so impressive that it is even hard to believe how such young artists could get used to the images of the distant past. What degree of love they show on stage! A huge rarity on the modern stage is love, not vulgar imitations of bodily relationships, but a psychologically subtle impulse coming from these heroes – the Polish girl Helena and the Russian student of the winemaking faculty Viktor. The actors play four ages of love, and each of their meetings through the years of separation only confirms that the feelings are fresh and no force could defeat them. In every word, every gesture, they are so natural and precise that it is impossible not to sympathize with the vicissitudes of their love.

“Warsaw Melody” – the legendary performance of the Vakhtangov. Many still remember him, and can you forget the great couple – Yulia Borisova and Mikhail Ulyanov in the same roles. One gets the impression that today’s modern guys have seized the baton of that great theater and magically returned to us what is now almost nowhere to look for.

The director of the play, Vladimir Ivanov, recalls:

“1985 is the year of our acquaintance with Leonid Genrikhovich. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Ulyanov was then working on Zorin’s play The Lost Plot and called me to help him. I remember very well our meeting at the first rehearsal with Leonid Genrikhovich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich and Natasha Moleva, who was Ulyanov’s partner in this work. Not so long ago, sorting through papers at home, I found a diary of those rehearsals – from the first day to the completion of work on the performance, which, unfortunately, did not come out then.

Then, in 1993, I produced Zorinsky’s “Royal Hunt” at the Shchukin School in my first year – with Masha Aronova, Anya Dubrovskaya, Volodya Epifantsev, Pasha Safonov, Kirill Pirogov – and, naturally, invited the author to this graduation performance. Our relationship, I dare say, became friendly. And until the end of his life, we talked with him, often visited …

On November 3, 2002, Leonid Genrikhovich, on the day of the premiere of The Royal Hunt, already on the stage of the Vakhtangov Theater, presented me with his collection, which was called Under the Curtain of the Century. Theater 1985 – 2000″, with a dedication inscription: “To my dear Vladimir Vladimirovich with gratitude and hope for new meetings.”

In this collection there is a little-known play “Crossroads” (subtitle: “Warsaw Melody – 97”), which became the continuation and conclusion of the story told in “Warsaw Melody” (1967). Her heroes, already elderly, thirty years after their last meeting at the Moscow Conservatory, by the will of fate, accidentally meet at the airport of a European resort.

Two young actors, students of the Shchukin Institute – Polina Rafeeva and Ivan Zakhava – made an independent work at the institute on the “Warsaw Melody”. Then the idea was born to put on a performance, combining two plays – “Warsaw Melody” and “Crossroads”.

The rules of a graduation student performance dictate that all roles – both young and old – are played by students. Probably, if this performance had been staged in the theater, there would have been some other solution (it would be possible to separate the couples – young and old), but … Still, this is primarily educational work. The hardest and most responsible!

It’s no joke to say that after Mikhail Aleksandrovich Ulyanov and Yulia Konstantinovna Borisova, playing the Warsaw Melody, albeit on the Simonov stage, and even age roles, is not an easy task! But how much her decision can give in understanding the chosen profession. Of course, this is audacity, but also excitement! And how interesting it is that we will get out of this … “

By decision of the management, the graduation performance “Warsaw Melody” (“Crossroads”) was included in the theater’s repertoire.

Irina Shvedova.

Author’s photo