Roast Macondo in the Russian North: Marquez was staged in Arkhangelsk

From the moment when, quite recently, friendly countries turned into unfriendly ones, the issue of import substitution in many areas has come to a head. Almost everywhere, except for the theatre. Once again, and not without pride, I was convinced of this when I visited the Russian North – in Arkhangelsk, at the local drama theater. By the way, the only one in the country who bears the name of not the founding father – a famous actor or director, but a scientist – Mikhail Lomonosov.

FROM THE DOSIER “MK”

In December 1846, the first city public theater was opened in Arkhangelsk. In the future, he changed his registration and name several times. So, in 1920, at the initiative of A.V. Lunacharsky, the theater began to be called the First Demonstration, then simply – City. The next season in the new building on October 27, 1932, the Arkhangelsk Bolshoi Drama Theater began. The theater went through two complete reconstructions of the building: in 1964-1967. and in 2001-2009. Over the years, Vladimir Davydov, Faina Ranevskaya, Sergei Lukyanov, and, of course, Sergei Plotnikov, who was the first in the north to receive the title of People’s Artist of the USSR, appeared on stage here.

Today, in a building that is huge by the standards of a small city (Arkhangelsk has almost 350,000 inhabitants), the theater life is in full swing in three halls – without passing or dubious names, the projects are different. The theater has its own ice skating rink, and, oddly enough, it was the ice that became the symbol of the premiere performance, Centenary Macondo by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What kind of ice is there in Latin America and why?

Marquez’s great novel was staged by artistic director Andrey Timoshenko, a native Muscovite, by the way, who for 10 years of his work here greatly raised the Arkhangelsk drama. Being an artist by his first education, he likes to compose original spaces. For the fictitious Latin American, Macondo did, perhaps, risky and sometimes dangerous – first of all for the actors and the audience too.

The last way to Macondo is not just given: first you need to go to the Abramovsky Hall, climb the bridges to the stage, and from there go down the steep stairs. At the behest of the stage designer, a small stage became the basis for the Makondo space, in which only 80 chairs are placed, which also rotate 360 ​​degrees. A meter and a half high along the entire perimeter, four walls rise, with four rear stages, not at all wide, on which Marques’s Macondo, founded by General José Arcadio Buendia, is built. And among the chairs, a rectangle of ice is installed right in the center on a pedestal. By eye, this block is 70 by 90 in size, and maybe more.

A short, ascetic-looking young man in a military jacket, with a look that betrays a fanatic in him, descends from above the steps to the ice, puts his hand on it, as if on the Bible in court, and says: “Many years later, just before the execution, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will remember that distant day when his father took him to look at the ice.

Since my place is right next to this thing, not immediately, but I begin to feel cold. And in contrast to the ice symbol (it is not yet clear what) a hot Latin American story begins to unfold on four surfaces. History, like the current time, where everything is repeated or looped: events in Macondo and in the family of its founder, where sex giants, sad beauties, revolutionaries, adventurers are born. Where the names of the characters, their phrases, the main actions are repeated. Prophecies, the curse of the family, and then there is the myth of the birth of a child with a pig’s tail … Some kind of devilry …

A kaleidoscope of a Latin American carnival, where not only fun, crazy or drunk, but also as a result of tragic events that not everyone will be able to do, the piano suddenly comes. So that, after a pause, everything would seethe again, come into motion, rotation, even separation from solid ground and flight.

In fact, one has to be very careful at such a performance – here, from the names of the characters alone, the head is spinning. Here is Jose Arcadio Buendia, the founder of the fictional town of Macondo, whose inquisitive mind and will are trying to comprehend the secrets of the universe – they are revealed to him by visiting gypsies. His wife is Ursula Iguaran, whose strength is not in participation, but in accepting relatives as they are in their oddities, and in forgiveness. Jose Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano, and also Amaranta, Renata, Remedios – there are also two of them. Sensual loving Pilar. Everyone has their own story, and it is told by the character himself, and someone from the Buendia family or a neighbor. The sequence or simultaneity of the narrative, of the action, explodes from time to time with insane stunts. The work of the actors – Dmitry Belyakov, Maria Bednarchik, Ivan Bratushev, Nina Nyanikova, Anastasia Volchenko, Maria Novikova, Nikolai Varentsov, Dzhambulat Bagov, Alexander Subbotin – is absolutely capital level.

And the thread of this family saga, so magically bizarrely woven by Marquez, cannot be missed. And in such an armchair you can’t relax, don’t take a nap, the feeling of restlessness is guaranteed to the viewer. The heroes of Marquez also dream of peace. The atmosphere, like wine, is infused, filled with intransigence, rage, sensuality. The figurativeness, which Andrei Timoshenko owns, is striking. For example, the scene of intercourse between Jose Arcadio Segundo and Remedios, who left her fiancé for his sake, is solved with the help of … wet towels: they take turns beating the sexual giant and his lover furiously against the black wall. The impacts of the water-heavy fabric and the traces of it are more convincing than the miserable somersaults of the artists on the stage with a bashful imitation of sexual intercourse. Here it is the image of sexual frenzy.

And what about the rag heads laid in a shaky pyramid, as in the famous painting “The Apotheosis of War”? Togo and look will roll in different directions. What about skeletons with failed eye sockets and insane grins of skulls? Bones rattling, they float away into the darkness of the backstage. Creepy. However, backstage is not provided here. During almost four hours of stage time (a break for one intermission), the artists do not leave the stage for a minute – they even have nowhere to sit down to rest. It remains only to guess how the props have time – they manage to give them various objects, costumes, of which there are many in the performance. A large production team is working harmoniously at the performance.

The one who takes on the Marquez novel, as a rule, makes Ursula the main character. Timoshenko has no passing characters, but the main character is still Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who next to me puts a narrow palm on the ice – a symbol of his stiffened soul. He easily leaves his children, born of different mothers, to throw himself into the abyss of the revolution, he goes to fight. And his war, like any massacre between people, will be senseless and merciless. In the end, he will sign a peace treaty, shoot himself in the chest, apparently tired of his own loneliness and not to know the future, where, alas, everything will happen again for humanity. But stay alive.

With Marquez, the impossible is possible: the past and the future can be ahead of the present, the dead break into real events and interact with the living, which brings confusion and raises questions: when did this happen to this or that hero? When the performance has covered a significant part of the way, the director will suddenly pause, which will greatly help the audience caught in this Latin American whirlpool. The actors, sitting on the edge of the stage, will tell in turn what happened to their characters before or after and why their present, presented in the first act, looks like this. Their time, like a piece of ice, is running out before our eyes.

The general, the founder of Macondo, horrified, will understand that after death there is nothing, and there is no God – the world will collapse. Ursula is waiting for the captivity of blindness. And their son, the heroic colonel, will spend his old age in the workshop, making goldfish. The fish in his hands are really made of metal, but the butterfly that landed on his finger will look like a real one: its bright blue large wings with brown streaks flutter in a living way. Closer to the finale, a little cold, I thought not about loneliness, but what if I came to Macondo again, but I should grab something warmer.

After the performance, we talk with Andrei Timoshenko.

— I wanted to convey the atmosphere of Marquez’s novel, its air, its magic — such things are difficult to drive into some kind of Procrustean bed, they are difficult to stage organization. To be honest, we took a big risk. New techniques were needed, and not previously used developments, I wanted to discover artists in a new way. But it is necessary to take risks, otherwise it does not develop me as a director, nor the theater, nor the artists.

– Yes, the actors lived the saga beautifully, they are always in sight. But how props and costume designers work. In such a space, you can’t hide behind the scenes – it simply doesn’t exist.

– Our props and fitters had a pretty hard time. The main difficulty is that they can hardly see anything, and they work according to the score, by ear. At the right moment, they must open this or that hatch, move the barrel with “blood” and at the same time not overturn it. There were very funny moments when, during the run, someone’s sneeze was suddenly heard out of “nowhere”. Many technical solutions turned out to be unexpected: it was impossible to make suspensions for microphones, they used a plywood shield as a microphone membrane. Or let’s say I wanted to find an old camera and matching old retorts from a real darkroom. However, in the process of rehearsals, we came to the conclusion that we need to do it easier – the main thing is not whether it will be a camera in a wooden case or, for example, the Soviet Zenit.

– And the butterfly? Is it real or is it a high-tech Chinese development?

She is alive, not artificial. We grow butterflies ourselves from pupae, here the pupae are just brought to us.