On the sand at the Vakhtangov Theater presented “The Tale of Sonechka” by Tsvetaeva

Marina Ivanovna wrote her “Tale of Sonechka” in 1937-1939, while in the small town of Lacanau-Océan on the Atlantic coast, shortly before her return to her homeland. The reason for writing was the belated news of the death of Sophia Golliday, with whom she was friends in Moscow for nothing – from 1918 to 1919. And if Tsvetaeva had not written this autobiographical story, full of romanticism and drama of the time, no one would have known who this Golliday was.

The stage is covered with sea sand. And all conversations, similar to an elegant, slightly hasty script, are accompanied by the sound of waves, booming and those that lazily play with small pebbles near the shore. Sand falls out in a steep slide from a small opening in the backdrop of the stage in a bright but cold light and grows into a larger mountain in the center of the space, where director Vladislav Nastavshev (who is also the designer of the performance) threw an old bookcase and also installed a platform. It is shaky and spins when the participants in this story, which is quite real, jump on it across the sand. It’s just the haze of light that trembles over the sandy scenery, along with the sound of the waves, giving it unsteadiness and unreality. But all this really happened…

There was Moscow, there was Borisoglebskaya Lane and there – Marina Tsvetaeva, at the time of her passion for theater, became friends with young Vakhtangov studio students – Yura Z. (Yuri Zavadsky), Pavlik A. (poet Pavel Antokolsky), Yura S. (actor Georgy Serov), Alexey Alexandrovich Stakhovich (Moscow Art Theater actor, theater teacher, whose life story served as Tsvetaeva’s basis for the play “Phoenix”), Volodechka (actor Vladimir Alekseev) and others. Among them, Sonechka Golliday especially stood out – an actress of very short stature, but with great and such original talent that the studio sometimes did not know what to do with it. This is the kind of Sonechka Marina Tsvetaeva loved and sang in her work, permeated with feelings and sensuality, romanticism and worship, intelligence, irony, valuable details of that passionate, daring and terrible revolutionary time.

Let me make a reservation right away that we are not talking about same-sex love. In the first part of the story, Tsvetaeva reports: “She and I never kissed: only when we said hello and goodbye. But I often hugged her shoulders, a gesture of protection, security, seniority. (I was three years older, but essentially my whole self. There was never anything “little” about me.) She hugged me brotherly. No, it was dry fire, pure inspiration, without an attempt to defuse, waste, realize”… Their love, in fact, is like a shelter for two loneliness, love is like a game, like music that Tsvetaeva puts together from phrases that envelop them in a flair, wrap them in warmth, smash them to pieces , captivating you into the sensual world, where it is difficult to say what is greater – passion or pain.

– Oh, Marina! How I love – to love! How madly I love – to love myself! From the morning, no, until the morning, that very morning – still sleeping and already knowing that again… Do you ever forget when you love – what you love? I never. It’s like a toothache – only in reverse, a reverse toothache…

Both are passionate about Yura Z. (Zavadsky), and he is “disgusting,” fickle, weak, with vanity fueled by the theater alone. Marina and Sonya share it, sorting out their feelings like rosary beads, throwing feelings around like a ball.

– Sonechka, where – in your crazy life – you don’t sleep, don’t eat, cry, love – do you have this blush?

– Oh, Marina! But this is the last effort!

You watch, listen and constantly catch yourself thinking: “How long has it been since you heard such an amazing text in the theater, written with a thin pen, followed by something unspoken that is difficult to put into words. Therefore, the hall does not breathe for three hours – this is how Tsvetaeva sounds, this is how the artists dissolve in her text, which only a poet could have composed.

“The Tale of Sonechka” is divided into only three voices – two female, one male. Evgenia Kregzhde as Marina Tsvetaeva (dark brown jacket over a light-colored simple dress to match), Ksenia Traister as little Sonechka (white blouse with an open collar, dark blue skirt) and Konstantin Beloshapka one in many historical figures (see above ) and one day today. The text is melodious, sweet like sugar and bitter, like bread in a foreign land, which Tsvetaeva drank in full. It sounds on the nerves, sometimes at the limit, and Vladislav Nastavshev constantly reinforces this limit with action, placing the actors on an unsteady rotating platform, and at the moment of emotional stress they balance on it with the risk of falling. After all, in love there is always such a risk – to fall and even fall, lose, get lost or freeze. Here Sonechka and Volodechka hovered parallel to each other on a vertical platform, like lovers flying over the city in Chagall’s paintings. The hovering trick is the director’s favorite technique: I remember I saw something similar in the play based on Bunin at the Gogol Center. But it’s not a sin to quote yourself, and not someone else.

Impetuous as a teenager, sharp-tongued, dark-eyed Golliday, with two braids over her blouse and ugly shoes, jumps up onto a chair. “Oh, Marina, everything I have is diminutive, everything is diminutive, all my friends, things, cats, and even men – all sorts of Katenkas, kitties, nannies, Yurochkas, Pavliks, now Volodechka… It’s as if I don’t dare say anything else . I only have you – Marina, so huge, so long… Oh, Marina! You are my magnifying glass.” And indulgent, full of patient love for this capricious child in love, Marina.

In the acting trio, the first violin, of course, is Evgenia Kregzhde. For an actress, this is certainly a milestone role. Her part is deeply dramatic, but always sensitive to her partner, not missing her ringing string, and at some point she herself becomes such. Only the drama sounds more and more strongly in it – from the light metropolitan bohemianism at the beginning to the hopelessness at the end of the story. And how true between the two heroines there is a host of men played by Konstantin Beloshapka, whose role in the play is auxiliary, but allows the development of a plotless story. The actor has twelve characters, indicated not only by makeup (the mustache alone does not count), and individual elements of the costume, but also by quickly changing images. I turned backstage with Zavadsky and came out as a sailor Pasha, transformed before my eyes into Stakhovich, then into Volodechka, and then into a completely unceremonious assembler.

The director, who in the play also acted as a set designer, composer and performer of songs behind the scenes, managed to quite elegantly push the boundaries of literary theater, to which the prose is so conducive. He constantly translates literature into an effective series with dizzying monologues on an unsteady, flowing surface, and in a number of mise-en-scènes he throws bridges from the past to the present in order to predict the future of the heroes. This is what the story looks like about Stakhovich, an aristocrat of spirit who got into a noose – he could not bear the losses in his family, he did not accept a new existence. And then the dead man with a rope around his neck, placed in a cabinet with a glass door, as if in a coffin, together with Sonechka, recalls the lessons of good manners that he taught the studio students – how to get up, how to give a hand or pull up a slipped stocking when walking down the street with a gentleman .

The exercise was played out easily and with passion, but it becomes creepy if you remember the beginning of the scene of the suicide of a worthy aristocrat. For some reason, Nastavshev’s suicide has a farcical character, like in a circus or guignol. This is perhaps the only rough paint on a finely executed canvas that has bothered me. But the director will immediately correct the rudeness, ending the scene with a metaphor: sitting in the closet, Stakhovich silently hands the rope to Marina, who is sitting opposite him, who, twenty-two years later, herself will take up the same one – with a loop at the end…

And even the song from the repertoire of the 90s “Cry, love, cry”, due to the arrangement (Ivan Lubennikov), fit into the musical series of the play, where songs based on Tsvetaeva’s poems sound as modern as if they were sung in some fashionable club .

And yet “The Tale of Sonechka” is not just love, as Tsvetaeva assured. She is still a witness of time, having preserved for us portraits of people of art who made the glory of the national theater in the 20th century. Not flattering, but rather voluminous, which for history is much more valuable than flawless images polished by ideology. After all, Tsvetaeva wrote that from Vakhtangov “there was a breeze and even a blast of coldness in her head: what the average person calls “fantasy.” The coldness and sterility of the word “fantasy” itself. That, however, did not stop her from dedicating the following lines to him in 1918:

Seraphim – on the eagle! What a fight!

Will you accept the challenge? – We’re flying beyond the clouds!

In a year of blood and thunder –

Death by an equal is a glorious occasion.

The wrath of the Lord has cast us out into the world,

So that people remember – the sky.

We will meet on Holy Thursday

Above the Church of Boris and Gleb.