Mark Rozovsky spoke about the anniversary of the theater “At the Nikitsky Gates”: “The experiment must be endured”
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Shakespeare and Molière went the same way
March 27 is World Theater Day. It just so happened that it was on this day in 1983 that the famous director and playwright Mark Rozovsky founded his own theater in Moscow. “One of the first in the country on full self-financing,” says Mark Grigorievich, recalling perestroika times. In the era of “pre-freedom” in the USSR, a lot of things arose, but not all projects and undertakings survived the years of the collapse of the Union, and especially the 90s. And Rozovsky’s “theatrician” became the Theatre, apparently, there is something special both in him and in his artistic director. About the biblical jubilee (no joke – 40 years!), masters, teachers, traditions and innovation, the MK correspondent talked with a friend of our newspaper.
– Mark Grigoryevich, four decades is a whole story. What did you understand during this time period about yourself, about the Russian theater in general and about the theater “At the Nikitsky Gates” in particular?
– About myself, I realized one thing – I do not have time for anything in this life. I should concentrate and do a couple of dozen more performances, release five or two books and finish at least one of the three unfinished plays. Success is more important than success! About the theater, I realized that it is grandiose and fleeting, and therefore you need to work in it at high speed, without rushing. And most importantly, what is human is eternal. The rest is zilch and vanity of vanities.
What does this date mean to you?
— I don’t want to repeat myself, but I once said: an anniversary is a catastrophe with a hint of a holiday. As for the theater “At the Nikitsky Gates”, this is a living brainchild, to which my whole life has been given. I hit one point for forty years, there were many temptations, many reasons to do something else. But I chose this path, and our theater today is a powerful undertaking. What is theater? It consists of a trinity: repertoire, audience and troupe. We have more than fifty titles in our repertoire. As for the troupe, it has outstanding artists who have become real masters before my eyes. (Maybe I also had a hand in this.) And as for the audience, I can say that almost always, with the exception of the times of covid, our performances are sold out. Our performances are multi-genre, multi-form, multi-lingual and multi-style.
— Can your theater be also called an author’s theater?
I write plays for my theatre. I don’t want to compare myself with Shakespeare and Molière, but they went the same way. Because the person who ran the theater had to provide it with plays first of all. And I do it to the best of my ability. But this way is fruitful! A real play is born together with the actors, with the audience and with the acting theater.
What else do I want to say? We are true to the Russian classics, true to the great Russian culture, which I have served all these years. We have a huge number of authors who are respected by the whole world. This is inescapable. I was a student of Tovstonogov, I try to follow the author’s world, ideas, author’s style, worldview, language. On this path, seemingly conservative, I feel absolutely free.
On the same path, we experiment, defending our credo: living academicism. Both words are extremely important. Alive means gambling, passionate, energetic theater. A theater where lofty thoughts do not need to be updated, artificially modernized, because they are absolutely modern. Ultimately, this is what we call academism.
– Aren’t following the tradition and innovation “two things incompatible”?
“Our theater is also capable of experimenting, but we believe that any experiment must be endured. The right to experiment must be earned by your skill and knowledge of the laws of the theater. Do not break these laws, but create new ones – that is what a real experiment is.
Newspaper headline:
“Forever is what is human”
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