Play by Maurice Maeterlinck in Sovremennik

Today at the Sovremennik Theater on the Other Stage there will be a premiere of the play based on the play “The Miracle of St. Anthony” by Maurice Maeterlinck, directed by Alexander Nazarov. Tells Esther Steinbock.

The theater’s choice of this name cannot fail to attract special attention from the audience. The fact is that “The Miracle of St. Anthony,” written in 1903 and then revised more than once by the author, is a play that is special for the Russian stage. Perhaps even in Maeterlinck’s homeland she does not have such an important background as in Russia.

The story of how a bourgeois family, after the death of a rich lady, divides her inheritance, but the appearance of St. Anthony significantly changes their plans, attracted the attention of great Russian directors more than a hundred years ago. The first to stage “The Miracle of St. Anthony” in 1906 was Vsevolod Meyerhold with the participation of Vera Komissarzhevskaya – it was a satire denouncing the bourgeoisie that had lost all shame.

Yevgeny Vakhtangov addressed Maeterlinck’s play twice. And if for the first time, in 1918, his work was imbued with the spirit of romantic pathos, although the genre was decided as an everyday comedy, then just three years later Vakhtangov staged “The Miracle of St. Anthony” as a sharp tragic grotesque. It was with this performance that the Vakhtangov studio opened in November 1921, which then, after the director’s death, became the Vakhtangov Theater in the mid-1920s. At the very end of the last century, another theatrical classic, Pyotr Fomenko, returned Maeterlinck’s satirical drama to the Vakhtangov stage, transferring the action of the play to Paris and saturating the performance with bright, sometimes caricatured motifs.

Of course, there were other productions of “The Miracle of St. Anthony” on the Russian stage, but the decision to stage Maeterlinck’s play means, as it were, a “re-appropriation” of the text – as if it is finally breaking out of the exclusively Vakhtangov “jurisdiction”. Director Alexander Nazarov defined the genre of his play as a “mystical farce,” and one of the interesting questions seems to be how the new production deals with the motif of anti-religious satire, which, undoubtedly, is present in the play, but today on the Russian stage is at risk.

The historical context of the production partly sets the general theme of the Sovremennik season, in which a look back into the theater’s past plays a significant role. First of all, this is due to the 90th anniversary of the birth of Galina Volchek, who led the theater for almost half a century. To mark the anniversary, exhibitions have been opened in the foyers of both stages of Sovremennik. In the spring they plan to hold a festival of student performances “Neformat” – this word for a series of independent works was also coined by Volchek. Well, the culmination of the memorial season should be the premiere of the dedication performance. It will take place on Galina Volchek’s birthday, December 19th. To all this we can add the new directorial work of Garik Sukachev – the play “SASHASHISHIN” based on the book “Kill Bobrykin” by Alexandra Nikolaenko. Sukachev was one of those young “outside” artists whom Volchek invited to the theater to update its repertoire and attract new viewers.

Indirectly, the program, seemingly dedicated to the future, “bows” to the theater’s past. “I want it like O.N.” – this is the name of the director’s laboratory of the theater, where the initials mean the founder of the theater Oleg Efremov. It is from this laboratory that several more premieres of the current season will come out, in particular, “People Live Here,” based on the play by Athol Fugard, directed by Gulnaz Balpeisova, and “The Catcher in the Rye,” based on the novel by Jerome Salinger, directed by Leila Abu-al-Kishek. The season should end with a “big classic” – Pyotr Shereshevsky is working on a dramatization of Anna Karenina.