Mark Rozovsky dedicated the thirteenth poetic performance to Joseph Brodsky

The first premiere of 2024 took place at the Nikitsky Gate Theater. On the Old Stage, Mark Rozovsky staged the thirteenth performance in the “Ribbon of Poetry” series, dedicating it to Joseph Brodsky. The semantic center of the “unlucky” production was the poet’s padded jacket during his exile in the village of Norinskaya. We know that Brodsky’s world-famous quilted jacket was not a mandatory item of clothing to wear, but rather a necessity and partly a theatrical gesture, so in Rozovsky it also acts as an element of pseudo-Gulag decor. The MK correspondent tried to figure out the director’s plan, but it seems that there can be much more than one interpretation.

The old stage of the theater on Bolshaya Nikitskaya is a very small space, plus the auditorium can accommodate almost fifty people. These circumstances automatically make any performance intimate and laconic, which acoustics helps not least. But any mistake there, whether made by the director or the actors, is clearly visible.

“A play about Brodsky” and about any poet in general is a genre trap; there are not many options for what to do and what to talk about – either you retell the biography (which requires scope), or you present a certain number of poems in theatrical performance. And the choice of which poems is not so important – the actors “pull” the creative task.

And Valery Sheiman and Andrei Molotkov pulled him out. Moreover, age did not prevent 66-year-old Molotkov from transforming into a young man who returned home after his first intercourse. During the performance of Brodsky’s most intimate poem, “about a key that fits many doors,” the artist was beautifully imposing and careless.

The duration of the performance is one and a half hours. The viewers themselves write in the comments that they could not stand so many poems in Brodsky’s voice, but the brilliant lines “played” by a pair of professional actors (one a national one, the other an honored one) simply fall into your consciousness and gradually dissolve in it.

The front edge of the stage is separated from the audience by “barbed wire” stretched between two wooden posts. The pillars are real, roughly hewn; if you touch them with your finger, you will get a splinter. But the thorn is completely decorative, but considering that the actors put their heads through it, it couldn’t have been anything other than woven from ropes (which you don’t immediately understand).

Brodsky’s “quilted jacket” hangs on the right pillar. There is some secret meaning in the number “629” sewn on him, but no one forced the future Nobel laureate to wear his world-famous quilted jacket (it was simply comfortable and warm, given the village lifestyle). And what’s more, there was no number on it: just look at archival photographs on the Internet, or better yet, in the emigrant magazine “Part of Speech” to be convinced of this.

But the pseudo-camp, pseudo-Gulag style (the Main Directorate of Forced Labor Camps ceased to exist in 1956, and Brodsky was exiled to a village in the Arkhangelsk region in 1964) was used for the depth of contrast and to emphasize the drama of the situation. Because the background curtain of the stage is the decoration of a Roman wall, and a split one at that. Between them, in a metaphorical sense, lies all of Brodsky’s work, his fate, earthly and posthumous glory, his belonging to European and world culture, which grew not even from rubbish, but from village dung. In the Norinsk IB, despite forced labor and unbearable conditions, he wrote from 80 to 170 poems, the data varies, but the period of creativity was extremely fruitful.

A padded jacket and a jacket from a three-piece concert suit were put on the shoulders of the actors, again one by one, this “change of frames” meant black and white stripes in life, referred to the wisdom from the Jewish joke-parable that no matter how you feel now (good or bad) ) – this will not always be the case.

With the help of the poem “Portrait of a Tragedy” the performance was “looped” – it begins and ends with the quote:

Let’s look into the face of tragedy. Let’s see her wrinkles

her hook-nosed profile, a man’s chin.

Let’s hear her contralto with notes of devilry:

the hoarse aria of the effect is louder than the squeak of the cause.

Hello, tragedy! Haven’t seen you for a long time.

Hello, the other side of the coin.

Let’s take a closer look at your details…

An antique theatrical mask was placed under a green sign with the word “exit” – and Valery Sheiman, performing the fragment, talks to the mask as if it were a living person.

And what’s surprising is that the audience knows Brodsky’s poems very well: “To the death of Zhukov”, “I am sitting by the window”… “I don’t want to choose either a country or a graveyard / I’ll come to Vasilievsky Island to die” everyone said to themselves, but hardly – before Rozovsky’s performance, everyone was so clearly aware of how close the theme of the theater was to Nobeliatus, who glorified Tragedy and wrote that “actors who are no longer applauded forget great lines”…

Apart from the only phonetic error, the duo of actors coped with their task perfectly. “Don’t respond to “Hey, boy!” Be deaf and dumb,/Even if you know the language, don’t speak it” – here you still need not “on it”, but “on it” (with an “e”), in the Old Slavonic manner, but this is a minor quibble.