On International Puppeteer’s Day, Stanislavsky played against connoisseurs

Stanislavsky at the entrance to the theatre. He is on the screen with questions for the audience. A failed scandal in the foyer – and, finally, he hovers on a cloud among the legendary Russian artists, playwrights, giving them slaps in the face. So easily with the great, but still without amikoshonstvo, celebrated at the Moscow Puppet Theater at Spartakovskaya International Puppeteer’s Day. In their company, the MK columnist also had fun.

At the entrance, the founder of the Moscow Art Theater and the Russian psychological theater is all cardboard-flat, full-length, and you can easily take a picture with him. Next to him are his students – Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, an associate of Nemirovich-Danchenko, with whom K.S. there was a very difficult relationship (they did not talk for years, but corresponded). But now it doesn’t matter either for them, let alone for us – equal-sized people reconciled long ago in heaven, becoming for posterity both a monument and a brand, and for someone a meme.

The theater team, great entertainers, dedicated an extensive program to the greats on the Day of the Puppeteer, which captured all two floors of the mansion on Spartakovskaya. With the help of the well-known photographer Alexander Lyskin, the audience was offered a voyage “With dolls around the world” – this is the name of the photo exhibition of the master, who traveled half the world in search of dolls and caught many great masters of puppetry in the lens. Here is Sergei Obraztsov on the street in the company of his English colleagues (and he, it turns out, is not tall), and he is also with Henrik Yurkovsky, the president of UNIMA, a great specialist in the crib – the Christmas mystery theater. Here both Bruno Leone and Valery Volkhovsky are people who left a noticeable mark on the puppet theater…

On the second floor, a team of experts led by Stanislavsky plays against the audience, asking them tricky questions from the screen. One of them is from the puppet Vakhtangov: “What does the word “rabduh” mean?” Significant silence. The question remained unanswered. Meanwhile, in the theater of ancient Greece, the slave spirit was a very important figure, but not a director, as you might think. The slave spirit looked out for especially drunk and noisy spectators and calmed them down by hitting the back with a rod. The actions of modern ushers fade against their background. In general, the team of Konstantin Sergeevich won a crushing victory over the audience. They were invited to drown out the bitterness of defeat with a spectacle called the Stanislavsky Guignol. The repertoire performance, which is a great success with the audience, has become the very cherry on the cake, without which the cake would not have been a success.

The spectacle began with a small scandal: some girl, walking along the foyer arm in arm with a gentleman in an old-fashioned blue suit, laughed loudly and defiantly. And in the hall, a couple of girls indignantly demanded that other girls vacate their seats: they have tickets. And these were still flowers, which turned out to be an overture to a guignol, which for some reason took the name of Stanislavsky.

For those who by chance do not know what a rabduh is, it is worth explaining what this guignol means. Guignol (from fr. Guignol) is a puppet of the fair theater of glovemakers, which appeared in French Lyon at the end of the 18th – beginning of the 19th century. In a broader sense, guignol means a play, performance or individual stage devices depicting various crimes, atrocities, beatings and torture. In general, natural sadism.

However, everything turned out to be not as terrible as promised, but insanely witty and original. Director Natalya Pakhomova and theater artists presented the public with the invisible, behind-the-scenes life of the theatre. The short-haired accompanist at the piano (Ivan Bolgov) sang Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko together with the audience, and they, in the form of dolls, sat on a cloud (each on his own). Along the way, they were joined by other major figures of the national theater – Vakhtangov, Shchepkin, Meyerhold, Yermolova, Komissarzhevskaya, Mikhoels, Mochalov, among the writers – our Chekhov and the Czech writer Karel Capek.

The latter was not here by chance. The guignol theater on Spartakovskaya took his story “How the play is staged” from the 1925 cycle as the basis for the guignol. “In this short but instructive review, we would like to tell the authors, the public and even critics about how the performance arises, what metamorphoses the play undergoes before it, like a butterfly, solemnly flutters out of the cocoon at the premiere,” the classics promised, and away. Chapek’s story is witty reworked taking into account the historical Russian realities: here they stage “The Seagull”, which at first, like a bird with outstretched wings, soars above the heads of puppet figures.

It begins with the search for the play and the author. Mochalov is hysterical, he becomes ill. “The doctors! The doctors!!!” they shout. An ambulance arrives, but not a car – a cart (when it happened!) with a doctor. And the doctor is Chekhov Anton Pavlovich, who, not yet knowing that he is a playwright, sits down to compose about “people, lions, eagles, horned deer …” Among the artists and directors, a funny seagull with red webbed paws insolently nurses. “But the theater is akin to the art of war and gambling at roulette – no one knows in advance what the performance will turn out to be.” Music (a pianist and a drummer who joined him) accompanies the theatrical frenzy, so talentedly invented. Everything plays – from the torments of the author, the distribution of roles to the dress rehearsal and the premiere.

Eleven young and wonderful actors with glove puppets, and they are the stage workers with only one line towards the artists (“They are not people”), they are the audience in the front row. The very ones that before the start of the performance quarreled among themselves for places. And already behind the screen they are fighting for the roles “Of course, before starting rehearsals, it is necessary to distribute the roles. And here the author gains useful experience, making sure that it is not so easy. Yermolova doesn’t want to play Masha and beats Komissarzhevskaya’s head against the wall, Vakhtangov beats Meyerhold with a cudgel, and Chekhov, like a doctor, sticks three syringes into the artist’s asses at once, and they rehearse with them. Yes, they almost killed Chekhov with their whims …

Two steps literally separate the screen from the first row, and this small space lives a tense behind-the-scenes life with tears invisible to the public, nightmares, a championship of ambition. Actors deftly manipulate their puppet geniuses and immediately become spectators that at the fatal moment of the premiere they come to the hall driven by subconscious sadism. “They are pleased to enjoy the excitement of the actors, the anguish of the author, the agony of the director. They come to gloat over the terrible situation on the stage, where every minute something can misfire, get confused, spoil the whole thing.

And the poor author will “never know if he succeeded in the play. Even the number of performances does not prove anything, for, in theatrical terms, if a play quickly left the stage, it is because it failed and is no good; if it has withstood many performances, it is because it is a hack that caters to base tastes.

End of the Stanislavsky Guignol. I must say that his success is largely determined by the dolls invented by the artist Evgenia Shakhotko. In them – and the resemblance to real prototypes, and irony, and love.