Rimas Tuminas taught artists to play to heaven

“He stood at the helm of the Vakhtangov ship for 15 years. And they became the era of the Renaissance of the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Theater – the era of “gentle power” of Rimas Tuminas. One of the most “Russian” Lithuanian directors… A student of Efros and Goncharov, a graduate of GITIS, he was in awe of Russian culture. He opened his Vilnius Maly Drama Theater with Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” and his first work at the Vakhtangov Theater was “The Inspector General” by Nikolai Gogol,” the theater, which plunged into mourning, reports on its website. Whatever political whirlwinds rule the world, the theater and those who truly built it with their hearts and are building it remain above… whirlwinds, fights, loud statements, protests and sanctions of all stripes. Rimas Tuminas was just one of those who over…

Yes, he was special. A snob, important, meaningful, privy to artistic secrets – this is definitely not about him. Laconic, reserved, but he could flare up and tell how to chop. Modest, simple, as if he were your neighbor at home, a carpenter or gardener who understood how to prepare supplies for the winter and make furniture with his own hands. An artist and a farmer rolled into one, who knew something about the land and its inhabitants. But this simplicity of his turned out to be akin to genius, akin to the insight that we witnessed.

What was it about his performances? What were they made of? What material and immaterial substances, what feelings are they made of? The answer is one of the simplest, which at some point suddenly turned out to be lofty truths! And he turned our eyes to… childhood. “Look there. “Uncle Vanya was found in the cabbage,” he explained to Sergei Makovetsky the image of Ivan Petrovich Voinitsky. And Makovetsky played his best role, so much so that from it alone one can now study the type of Russian intellectual in Russian literature. As well as the aged Onegin in his own performance, and the young Onegin can be judged by the work of Viktor Dobronravov. Tatiana with a Russian soul, performed by Olga Lerman, Evgenia Kregzhde, and now young Ksenia Traister… – he created them that way. Where trepidation and determination are combined with subtle poetry and humor, irony.

Many were perplexed for a long time – how this Lithuanian of Russian theatrical training fell in with the Vakhtangov School, the Vakhtangov Theater. There is a question and surprise at the same time, but the result is amazing, stirring up theatrical Moscow, spoiled, demanding in its demands, it is obvious: he breathed new life into the academic theater, gave wonderful roles to its actors of different generations, extending the stage life of Borisova, Maksakova, Makovetsky, Simonov , Knyazev, Lanovoy, Etush, Kupchenko, Konovalova, whom in her 90s he made his talisman. And about Maksakov he said this: “When he plays, I am calm about the performance.” He discovered and managed to educate a new generation of actors, whom he always taught the main thing – they must play according to the laws of heaven: “And then the angels, together with us and the audience, will smile.”

I can’t forget his play “The Pier,” composed for the 90th anniversary of the theater? It is like a grandiose generational idea about true, not imaginary values, about memory, which not all highbrow critics appreciated then. Even the national theater award clearly missed the mark here, noting the performance with just a special prize, which was essentially humiliating for both the theater and the Master. But the idea was great, visionary, and it belonged to Rimas Tuminas.

A powerful artist with excellent taste, but of a modest physique, he sculpted large-scale, epoch-making canvases – “Oedipus the King” was produced in the Greek Epidaurus, “War and Peace” – in Moscow. And this was still that war for him… With an incurable disease, with himself. Those who were present at the rehearsals in the fall of 2021 did not believe – him and themselves – that the Master would make it to the premiere. They compared him with Vakhtangov, whose departure he seemed to repeat: a hundred years ago. the creator of the theater died while releasing his “Princess Turandot”. And Tuminas was rehearsing Tolstoy’s epic novel, coming from the clinic where he was undergoing chemotherapy. She withered him, deprived him of his strength, she killed him, and he, barely able to stand on his feet, stubbornly returned to the hall and continued to disassemble, unravel the fateful knots of Russian history, connecting them with the destinies of those who for a Russian person have long become not even an image, and the symbol is Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov. His own struggle for life was going on, and in it he did not give up, he was still the same Rimas as always – laconic, ironic, fashionably dressed…

He was sick, tormented by illness, but Tolstoy’s heroes on stage loved and how beautifully they loved! Or they ugly pretended to love. And he sent them back to childhood again, reconstructing the same nursery with dolls and a palm tree, where they clumsily confessed their love for the first time, and, having grown up, desperately waltzed. And Natasha’s flying white dance, after more than three hours, turned into a black dance of death – a symbolic cry for the murdered Prince Andrei… Damned war… Rimas seemed to have foreseen it long before all the events. He said: “War awaits the world.” That time he broke through, and death, the motives of which always sounded in his productions, retreated.

Then, for the 100th anniversary of Vakhtangov, he came up with the “Day of Silence”, and the way the centenary anniversary was celebrated in the theater on Arbat was never celebrated anywhere else. In the morning, the theater opened its doors to its audience, who enjoyed history and modernity without noise, the usual speeches and an orchestra. He contrasted the official with the humane – quiet, kind, wise, eternal. He understood something about the eternity into which he had now gone… He left instantly – a blood clot burst in his lung.

Following him, the theater wrote: “Farewell, Master! Farewell, dear Rimas Tuminas! A low bow and gratitude for the happiness of being with you – working, studying and comprehending the great miracle – Theatre!