“Shakespearehamlet” in the Moscow City Council Theater dies of … lust

While the spectators are taking their seats, the beautiful actor Alexander Filippenko walks in different directions across the empty stage, open to the back, like a restless person – his face is pale, his suit is black, his hands cannot be seen from his jacket. Neither give nor take – Ghost. And so it will turn out: the Ghost of Hamlet the father will wander about, not embarrassed by either the public, or the guards of Fortinbras, or the royal persons.

I must say that the couple – the widowed Gertrude and Claudius, who contributed to her widowhood – amuses from the very beginning. Their first scene will set the tone for the tragedy of gloomy Elsinore and Denmark, which is “more terrible than all the prisons of the world.” However, the Mossovet “Hamlet” -2022 will be out of politics.

“I love you, I love you,” whispers Gertrude (the first Moscow Soviet beauty Yevgenia Kryukov), clinging to her brother-in-law, who somehow looks like Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was recently dismissed in the British kingdom.

Kisses, kisses, whispers of love, cute giggles deliberately demonstrate the intimacy of relationships. Claudia (Sergey Yushkevich from Sovremennik was invited to this role) is wearing a civilian black suit and homemade flip-flops without a back. And the queen in a white puffy dress of coarse sheet fabric and with an open back – they didn’t have time to fasten the “zipper” in a hurry. And again a gentle whisper, amplified by radio microphones: “I love, I love, I want, I want …” It is clear from everything that the couple does not get out of the bed. Their dove cooing is supported by the noisy beating of bird wings – obviously from the attic of the royal halls.

The couple will once again be shown to us in a bunk, but not material, but conditional – in the window of a cut-out black backdrop, in which Gertrude’s shoulders, Claudius’s torso and concern in movements and faces are by no means the fate of the country.

The Pale Ghost will turn to Prince Hamlet (Kirill Byrkin), a thin, but wiry and bald as a knee, young man, of course, of a nervous type. Other characters are also revealed – Polonius (Valery Yaremenko in an expensive suit, like some vice-president of a reputable company), Ophelia (Anna Galinova – a red-haired fat woman from fat women). The folder will call her Feley instead of Ophelia, and her admirer Hamlet will generally be called “bald creature.” Felya will spit twice at Hamlet in the literal and not figurative sense and will not miss.

Like any well-fed child, Felka chews all the time, while her father and brother Laertes (Mitya Fedorov) alternately rub her about a girl’s honor from a young age. Hamlet nervously rushes around the stage, now in jeans lowered to his boots, now in shorts. And in the background, a huge crowd of at least 30 young ladies (evening dresses with bare shoulders) indifferently sucks on IQOS and with tired movements depicts something sexy, but not obligatory. The number of extras of the Theater of the Moscow City Council, obviously, will report for the student “Bridge” attached to it.

Something like this in a brief retelling looks like Shakespeare, translated into theatrical language by Eugene Marchelli. For his Hamlet, he took the prose translation of Mikhail Morozov in 1954, rewriting it pretty much, supplementing or developing what the well-known specialist in Shakespeare’s work did not have in mind. Rhyming text is more difficult to rewrite, and prose is one or two. Therefore, Marcelli and Fel, and a lot of other literary bad taste.

But Morozov, being a first-class translator, prefaced his “Hamlet” with very specific instructions: “His (translation. – M.R.) the sole purpose is to reflect with the greatest possible accuracy the semantic side of the original. It is well known how important the semantic nuances of the text being performed are for directors and actors working on a play. From these seemingly “minor” details, sometimes whole images grow. First of all, a real translation is intended for directors and actors.”

But it seems that Marcelli does not need a translation to understand the meanings and images – he wrote what he wanted. The question – how did he write and what exactly did he want, why in 2022, already complicated by difficult events, did he turn to Hamlet, and not to Gorky’s novel “Mother”, remained unanswered. About debauchery and collapse in the kingdom? May be. About the fragile child’s psyche and a bad mother? Why not? But there is a dubious text put together like a digest, there are tricks from the set of the day before yesterday’s modern theater, where screams and tantrums, personal or collective, are mandatory, rape (ideally – mothers by son), transvestism (men in women’s dresses) and other clichés. So a flat story is ready with an unmotivated montage of scenes, but with a couple of spectacular visual pictures.

One of them is “The Mousetrap” with the arrival of actors who look like gloomy fitters who have not been paid for six months. As the main design element, the artist Anastasia Bugaeva used a single detail – a fluffy New Year’s garland made of white paper, which also formed a snowy mountain in The Mousetrap. Claudius will appear on top of it, launching poison into the ear of his sleeping brother, then Gertrude, who swore love to him, but in fact jumped out in a month to get married without wearing out her shoes.

However, the translator’s text is about shoes (“… In a short month, before the shoes in which she followed the body of my poor father wore out, she was all in tears, like Niobe … She, she … Oh my God!. .) the director ignored.

And fat Ophelia’s madness and her suicide? She is killed behind the scenes. And how she was killed is reported to the viewer by a girl with eyes that stopped in horror and in a short black dress, which in the previous scenes was silently present next to Felya. So, this bearer of bad news, like a deaf-mute, shouts something inarticulate into the hall about a pond, a drowned woman, and from a shock of feelings, an orgasm happens to her. The deaf-mute orphan can hardly restrain himself, so as not to fall on the stage and not to huddle in orgasmic convulsions.

Sex in large doses was not good for the murderer Claudius, who for no reason at all suddenly begins to spit up blood: apparently, he overworked himself in bed. Like the director on stage, he didn’t have enough strength for the finale. Claudius will briefly outline the essence of the finale to Laertes: they say, your sword, lad, is poisoned and there is poison in a goblet of wine. “Iodine?” – clarifies the pedantic Laertes. “Poison,” Claudius will answer in a tone that is usually used with naive fools.

And yet, the director will allow himself one topical, bold hint – in the “Mousetrap” scene, the actors will say that in the capital, where fees, of course, are higher than in the provinces, it is now forbidden to play. Such a cheeky fig in an empty pocket.

As for the actors, there are no complaints against anyone – everyone honestly plays what they are told. In addition, the troupe in the “Mossovet” is still decent, but such a provincial approach to work, as in “Shakespearehamlet”, and earlier in “Cruel Intentions”, will bring down the metropolitan chic.