Review of Anton Fedorov’s Madame Bovary at the Mask Theater

Leonid Roberman’s theatrical agency “Art-Partner” produced Anton Fedorov’s play “Madame Bovary” based on the novel by Flaubert on the stage of the Mask Theater (new stage of MDM). The result was a satire on Russians dreaming of a beautiful French life. Attended the premiere Marina Shimadina.

Theatergoers were looking forward to this event with particular impatience: Anton Fedorov is the clear leader of the young generation of directors working in Russia. A student of Yuri Pogrebnichko, he started at his theater “Near the Stanislavsky House”, worked a lot in the regions – Voronezh, Pskov, Kazan, Almetyevsk, etc., and his performances have already reaped the harvest of “Golden Masks”. He is best known to Muscovites for his productions at the former Gogol Center (“Petrovs in the Flu,” “Bukowski”), and after its closure, in the very nearby chamber space “Inside.” Here is one of his best, in my opinion, performances, “Where have you been so long, dude?” with Rosa Khairullina as Cheburashka.

A year ago, Fedorov headed the Novosibirsk theater “Old House”, replacing Andrei Prikotenko, who moved to the “Red Torch” in this post. It is interesting that just six months ago Prikotenko also produced a play based on “Madame Bovary” at the Moscow Theater of Nations, about which we already wrote (see “Kommersant” dated June 28, 2023). And the two productions clearly have something in common with each other.

Both directors treated Flaubert’s scandalous work quite freely. Prikotenko focused on the line of Emma’s husband Charles, brilliantly played by Alexander Semchev, reducing to a minimum the role of the main character played by Alexandra Revenko. Fedorov almost completely abandoned the text, retelling the plot in that birdlike language of interjections, sighs, whispers and various quotes that is so familiar to his fans. But, let’s say, in “The Dude,” the characters’ speech, chopped into small okroshka (or rather, into borscht, which became one of the key images of the play), created the image of their native collective unconscious. There, any intonation, phrase, aphorism, line from a song was recognizable “on one note” – so all this Russian hopelessness, where the husband always drinks or sits, and the wife meekly waits for him, is sewn into our subcortex.

In Madame Bovary, Fedorov tried to use this technique, on the contrary, to alienate. When our artists try to imitate the French, it usually turns out badly. In fact, the performance is built on this curiosity, brought to the point of grotesquery. Tender Emma (played by the busy Natalya Rychkova in “The Dude”) lives here somewhere in a Khrushchev “socket”, but dreams of a beautiful French life. Like Pushkin’s Tatyana, she lives in the world of romance novels, preferring not to notice the harsh reality. At night, she feverishly leafs through a tattered book, her fetish, in awe of alien names, and she herself tries to insert more foreign vocabulary into her speech. But for some reason, the rest of the characters in the play speak a mixture of “French and Nizhny Novgorod”. And this mixture, I must say, is vigorous. Here everyone exercises to the best of their depravity, distorting both languages. Francophones may be able to more subtly appreciate the play on words besides “reading” and “thank you,” but the rest are phrases like “fuselage for boarding,” “deep fryer haute couture,” “make yourself comfortable,” and so on.

The performance is designed in the genre of farce or even guignol – with freakish mask images, exaggerated puppet plasticity and pedaling, as Bakhtin would say, of the material and bodily bottom. Emma Steinberg’s husband Charles turned out to be the most human of all the characters. A simple doctor, he is not high enough, but he sincerely loves his wife, although he does not satisfy her in bed and instantly falls asleep after a minute of fussing on a narrow ottoman. “What the hell? Where is the bliss, passion and rapture? – Emma will say in Russian after her wedding night. Relationships on the side will also not bring her the desired happiness. Her first lover Rodolphe (Arthur Beschastny) is a caricature of a macho man, who in the end for some reason depicts Van Gogh with a cut off ear (“It’s just an ear infection,” he says without a pause between words, pointing to the bandage on his head). And the second, broken and cutesy Leon (Sergei Shaydakov), is a caricature of a mime from a fair booth. There is nothing good in the family at all: the mother-in-law (Olga Lapshina) is like a woman carved out of stone, who will stop a galloping horse and won’t go into her pocket for a word. And Emma’s daughter is played by midget actress Anna Nikishina, which explains the heroine’s disgust towards her own child.

In Emma’s imaginary world, there are gardens and lakes in the backdrop, fireworks go off, the carriage drives on its own and records what is happening on video, and on the large curved screen on the right, Nadia Goldman’s witty animation demonstrates what cannot be shown on stage. But when the hour of reckoning comes, the failed Frenchwoman has to return to reality – instead of idyllic landscapes, boring gray high-rise buildings appear on the screen. “Why are you cackling? “You’re Russian, so speak Russian,” the wealthy businessman Lere (Rustam Akhmadeev) rudely reprimands her and hands over a resolution from the Khamovnichesky Court to seize property for debts. Here the intonation of the play changes sharply, and drama ensues with a naturalistic scene of Emma’s poisoning. But the trouble is that after two hours you get so tired of the monotonous farce that you can no longer switch to a different register of perception and begin to sympathize with the characters who have been comic masks all this time.