Puppet Chekhov and other effects

The traditional annual international visual theater festival TREFF took place in Tallinn. Its main event, according to Esther Steinbock, was the performance of the play “Chayka” based on Chekhov’s “The Seagull”.

The TREFF festival was in its thirteenth time, and the damn dozen really updated everything they could. Firstly, this is the first full-fledged festival after the pandemic. Secondly, both he himself and the theater that once invented him have changed their profile. The Tallinn Puppet Theater has recently been called the Youth Theater – and it would be strange for the festival to remain “puppet”: now it is called the Visual Theater Festival. Many puppeteers are offended by these metamorphoses: they say that the times when the names “puppet” theaters were embarrassed and sought to jump out of the imaginary children’s “reservation” at any cost seem to have passed. One way or another, the international community of puppeteers gathers first of all at TREFF, and the format of the festival itself is not so much a “holiday for the city” as a show case for professionals: in just four days, a dozen and a half performances should “flash” before the public , and only experienced viewers can withstand this.

In such a hurry, there is simply no time to reflect on where the boundaries between the visual theater, the “theater of objects”, the puppet theater, the theater of the puppet and the actor, and whether they need to be looked for at all, are simply there. The authors of the program, having renamed the festival, seem to immediately refute themselves, offering performances of various genres and formats: from a musical and light installation to modern dance, from the inevitable puppet show “for the smallest” to the good old clowning. In the latter genre, one of the leaders by tradition is the British. Two skillful clowns, Dick Downey and Adam Blake, performed in Tallinn a funny performance called “Clownophobia”, an incendiary performance for all ages. Although, perhaps, it would be better to take the children out of the hall ten minutes before the final, because at the end of the performance, for some reason, the clowns stripped naked and began to dance furiously, demonstrating far from athletic bodily forms.

Probably, it was a symbolic gesture of liberation, because according to the plot, the characters cannot start their own performance in any way and all the time check with the script imposed on them by an invisible director. Deftly manipulating simple cardboard scenery, two pranksters demonstrate a fair amount of skill – it seems that it doesn’t cost them anything to involve the auditorium in the game, pull the audience onto the stage, then pour water from sprinklers on it, climb right over their heads through the rows of chairs, instantly jump from touching smiles to impatient anger, bullying and making funny faces, playing with imaginary objects and playing with dolls, clowning around and pretending to sob. The secret of this kind of performances is one – observing the genre, do not stop for a minute, do not let the public breathe. And for the first forty minutes, the two British clowns do it well, and the second – not so much.

Those who succeeded in everything they planned and even more than that were the director and artist Natasha Belova (our compatriot, who has been living in Belgium since the mid-1990s) and the actress Tita Iakobeli, who invented the play “Chayka” based on Chekhov’s play. One might even say Chekhov’s plays, because the one-act “Swan Song” about an old actor saying goodbye to the stage, and therefore to life, also comes to mind. Here, too, we are talking about an old actress named Chayka, either in a dream or in reality, who ended up on stage in the evening in front of a few spectators – and this is her last performance. She has to play Arkadina, but since her partners are not here, she has to play the whole play by Chekhov “The Seagull” alone, using only those few items that are at hand. So, a teddy bear becomes Treplev, a pink gauze scarf becomes Nina Zarechnaya, and a large heavy chair becomes Trigorin.

But it’s not the witty play with objects and Chekhov’s play, whose dramaturgy, by the way, has more than once given very interesting shoots in the puppet theater, that makes this performance an event, but the amazing doll created by Belova, and the way Iakobeli works with her. They literally grew together, like Siamese twins – a young actress and an old actress-doll. Shayka here is like the second torso of Jacobeli, like a decrepit shoot on a young trunk, so that for two there are two legs of a real actress, and the doll has only one puppet hand, and the other is a living, acting one. Without visible effort, without the slightest sentimentality and without pathos, some amazing act of absolute mastery is performed on the stage in this performance. You see with your own eyes how the actress works with her voice (the performance is played in Spanish) and with her hands, and at the same time you cannot understand how the real “revival” of an amazing doll takes place. The tilt of the head, gestures, intonations – this is still understandable. But how does the expression of a seemingly motionless face change when thin gray hairs open under the old woman’s wig? Probably, the play of light and the subtle calculation of the angle of inclination of the puppet face. And how is it that tears well up in glass doll eyes? However, maybe they are welling up on the eye of the beholder.