Procrustean lodge – Newspaper Kommersant No. 170 (7371) of 09/15/2022

XIII International Theater Festival “Alexandrinsky” opened with the premiere of a new performance by Valery Fokin “One Eight Eight One” based on the play by Boris Akunin. comments Dmitry Renansky.

This time, Valery Fokin, as you can easily guess from the name of the production, was interested in the mechanics of the conservative turn of 1881 – from the “great transformations” of Alexander II to the counter-reforms of Alexander III. The plot of “1881” develops strictly in accordance with historical chronology: from the debate around the “Constitution of Count Loris-Melikov” with its idea of ​​popular representation and restriction of the rights of the emperor, which the liberals considered too weak, and the Slavophils extremely pernicious, to the assassination of the liberator tsar; from the accession to the throne of his son to the entry into the political scene of Pobedonostsev and the adoption of the “Manifesto on the inviolability of autocracy”. At the same time, Alexandrinka’s artists work with the text based on documentary sources in such a way that they make the audience fidget, exchange glances and whisper – if you wish, “1881” can be read as a chronicle of post-Soviet Russia.

Fokin really recalls the cyclical nature of Russian history, in which terror, unrest, thaw and stagnation replace each other – but instead of staging Boris Akunin’s overly verbose play as a topical agitation, the director returns to his usual existential territory. The key to “1881” is contained in the very first episode of the performance: during the performance of Gogol’s “Inspector General”, the father instructs his son on how the heir to the throne should behave in public, and then admits with what pleasure he would have escaped from bored officialdom. Building a mirror copy of the auditorium of Carl Rossi, one of the main symbols of Russian statehood, on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the artist Alexei Tregubov, of course, was thinking about the “society of the spectacle.” In this space, viewed from all sides, Fokin explores the situation of constant public loneliness, total alienation from life: Ivan Volkov and Ivan Trus play Alexander II and Alexander III as hostages of fate, driven into the Procrustean bed of political drama.

Its theatrical language brings to mind another performance by Valery Fokin from the life of the Romanov dynasty – The Last Night of the Last Tsar, released a quarter of a century ago, where the story of the assassination of Nicholas II was dressed in the form of a tragic clowning. In 1881, an arena grows over the parterre of Alexandrinka: carpets, ponies, “little people” reduce pathos and spur action. The intrigue is set in motion by a series of tricks – both the séance of Blavatsky, who predicts an imminent catastrophe for Russia, and the fatal explosion of the carriage are staged like circus acts. The Kafkaesque montage of rides is continued by the countless beards, sideburns and wigs that, together with the meticulously reconstructed costumes, at first seem like a statuary historical blockbuster at face value. So Fokin brings the viewer to the central conflict of “1881” – front and intimate, external and internal. Here, wearing similar blue-gold uniforms, Alexander II and Alexander III freeze picturesquely in the imperial box, welcoming the hall applauding them – but their tormented, suffering bodies are alternately reduced by a spasm of a nightmare.

Persistently rhyming two emperors, reflecting them in each other, Fokine introduces into “1881” the most important motif of his theater – duality. It is no coincidence that the best episodes in the play are those in which the director leaves the main characters alone – like the culmination of the second act, when Alexander II watches from the box his son’s renunciation of liberal ideas, staged by Pobedonostsev. At the end of the first act, Ivan Trus, dressed in a luxurious robe, heavily approaches the gurney with a corpse wrapped in a sheet. The dead light of a modern neon lamp, the painful ringing in the ears – the Coward plays in great detail here the transformation of Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich into autocrat Alexander III. Accepted into the troupe of the oldest theater in Russia a year ago, the young Belarusian actor does not say a word in this scene – but manages to easily outplay many of his colleagues. In total, there are more than thirty names on the list of artists involved in the production: “1881” is one of those rare performances that justify the existence of a ponderous model of repertory theater, which often looks like an anachronism these days.