Marshak for adults staged at the School of Dramatic Art

On the Small Stage in a black office, where only a small screen was used as a set, four figures in black suits with whitened faces. These are four masks that even have names – Chepuholog (a simpleton), Chepuhologist (a learned man with a red fez on his head), Chepukhoved (a more sophisticated version of the Chepuhologist) and Chepushinka diluting the male company (a coquette in a dress in the fashion of the beginning of the last century). On the screen, “waves are playing, the wind is whistling, and the masks do not bend or creak”, but read:

Three wise men in one bowl

They set off across the sea in a thunderstorm.

Be stronger

old basin,

My story would be longer.

Four wise men, and not at all three, as in the English folk song, they are also experts in nonsense, embark on a dangerous journey brightly, cheerfully, ironically, and even with sadness. Philosophical themes here, as in clowning – through children’s perception. That is, openly, directly. Well, the specialists in nonsense, rest easy, will try to return to the viewer this direct view of the world. Even if not for long – the performance goes on for about an hour and a half.

Masks make it unusually easy, funny, naive, without fear of seeming ridiculous and ridiculous. They deal with nonsense among themselves and with the viewer, interactively expanding the stage space. In the “nonsense” it is unobtrusive: here the spectators of the first row will be cleaned with shoes, and between the audience of the middle and distant rows, like the real gingerbread in the market, they played a poem about nine blacks, and it is known how the matter ended there. Light, funny, play different instruments.

Working with masks is not as easy as it seems. And in this sense, the tradition of the Vakhtangov Theatre, from where, in fact, the Vakhtangov Workshop arose as an independent structure, stretches from Princess Turandot, Dead Souls with Maria Aronova and Knyazeva’s own performance The Ask the Artist. It was in the latter, dedicated to the outstanding personality of the Moscow Art Theater teacher and director Leopold Sulerzhitsky, that Asya Knyazeva first tried to use Tsani masks from Turandot as replicas, and generally made them the main ones in Nonsense.

Slightly more than 30 verses were performed by the artists at a good pace, but not overwhelmed. The drive from the game is the pleasure of the public. The director understands how to hold the hall, manage its emotions, create the atmosphere of the performance. At a high emotional level, when the audience seems to be ready to participate in almost every episode, in the finale the action suddenly turns into a Shakespearean theme:

How illusory is my existence!

How illusory is my existence!

And then what? And then nothing…

The body will forget the name and nickname, –

Not a being, but only a substance.

So be it. I do not pity the flesh of perishable,

Though she’s in her seventh decade

Permanently serves as a mirror of the universe,

A witness that there is light.

It’s not such a crazy thing, it turns out.

After the performance, we talk with the director Asya Knyazeva.

– Asya, where did the idea to show Marshak for adults come from?

“I love non-sense literature very much. I love long and dearly. Marshak opened the poems of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll for the Russian people. The translation of such poetry is not just a translation, but, in fact, an independent original work, since new meanings appear while maintaining the rhythm. In addition, Marshak has amazing translations of Burns and other English poets. And if you turn to his independent poems, you are amazed at how voluminous, how different the poet’s work was.

We used to treat him like a child. And this trick worked great. The whole performance is based on a story about three wise men who swam in a basin across the sea, and even in a thunderstorm. From the point of view of common sense – an adult – this is madness. From the point of view of the heart – children’s perception – this is a feat. A kind of game of meanings.

The sages answered: nonsense – this nonsense sometimes drives all accomplishments. It is crazy dreams that generate progress, move us forward. And any adult person is a former child who has gained some experience of his own, has grown wiser, ossified. And we wanted with our performance to appeal to the inner child of every person, to make him laugh, to remind him of his own childhood dreams and aspirations.

Marshak said: “Learn wisdom from children”, that is, do not be afraid to make mistakes, do not be afraid to rejoice and dream, in a word, “do not be afraid to live” – ​​love every present moment.

– Which of the verses of the classic have not been heard before or are little known to the reader?

– We turned to Marshak’s poetry in the theater. He is rarely addressed in this way, so it seems to me that many of the poems sounded from the stage for the first time. Probably, many of them people know, remember from childhood or read to their children. But from the stage, I think they either never sounded or they rarely sounded …

– I understand that your “Vakhtangov Workshop” is a team of free actors. But where are the guys working to ensure their existence?

– Actors – Anton Vlasov, Ivan Avdeev, Gosha Shimonenko, Toma Lavrik – all from our “Vakhtangov workshop”. We, a young team, make performances, play them on the stage of the ShDI on Novoslobodskaya, for which we are very grateful to the theater director Olga Eduardovna Sokolova, who sheltered us so warmly and carefully in her house. We gradually have our own repertoire, where we turn to different authors: classics – Chekhov, Marshak, Dostoevsky, Collodi; modern literature – Strizhevskaya, a group of playwrights led by Elena Isaeva. We are not going to stop, we go forward, like those wise men in the basin. This, by the way, is another reason why “Nonsense” is close and understandable to us.