The Karelian Puppet Theater showed “Inspector” with rats and bedbugs

Igor Kazakov is a graduate of the Belarusian Academy of Arts. For thirteen years he worked at the Mogilev Puppet Theater, where he came as a very young man. Of these, ten years was the chief director. Since 2020, he has been working in Minsk, where he headed the Modern Art Theater. He keenly feels the classics, and his puppet characters have come to life more than once in the territory of great literature – in Hamlet, At the Bottom, The Queen of Spades, Candida.

At the Puppet Theater of the Republic of Karelia, Igor Kazakov staged a two-hour performance based on The Inspector General as a story of fear that drives the characters, forcing them to do the wildest things. Everyone has a bunch of sins – bribes, offenses, as well as indifference and greed. The main thing is that it was sewn-covered, did not come out.

An unusual art space and puppets were created by Tatyana Nersisyan, the main artist of the Belarusian Puppet Theater and the winner of the Golden Mask. The stage is slanted, tilted like a hill. The window is open, and someone falls out all the time, more often than others, the superintendent of schools jumps into a hole – a character backwards. His head is out of place. The dramatic actor on the stage and the puppets are equal in size, and their interaction gives an amazing effect.

A host of colorful officials appears on the stage. They seem to be gray, faded, but colorful at the same time. Their huge heads are so jammed on the body that sometimes nothing but the legs is visible, as with Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin. From this torso look like a caricature. The postmaster has a head at the level of his stomach, and some kind of skeleton rises above his shoulders, creating the illusion of decapitation. As soon as the actors breathe in these shriveled and giant “snouts”.

Every now and then two huge black rats with red luminous eyes jump out from under the stage. They are more like bears. On the walls of the miserable room where Khlestakov lives, and in the respectable house of the Gorodnichiy, fat bugs now and then dart.

The young actor Rodion Mikhno plays Khlestakov – elongated, with a small head. You still need to get used to it. You don’t immediately accept it like that against the background of monsters with huge heads.

First, one Khlestakov will appear from the hatch – an unsightly, tiny, red-haired, some kind of child. Then another door will open, and another Khlestakov will jump out of the ground – a long one, with a disproportionate body.

Interestingly, the Bashmachkins in Igor Kazakov’s play Gogol. Triptych” is also a few. First, it is a baby with an umbilical cord, which is born in front of our eyes. It is removed from the parted female legs, which seem to be spewed out by a gloomy wall, reminiscent of a cemetery columbarium. A gray and wrinkled old man is born. Then he becomes an adult, but at the same time very tiny. Akaki Akakievich, like an ant, runs through snow-covered St. Petersburg, and then becomes a pretty worm living in a torn overcoat. He will sit in it like I am an apple, which seems to have gnawed itself.

Rodion Mikhno-Khlestakov, together with Oleg Romanov-Gorodnichiy, was nominated for the Golden Mask in the acting category. They have bright works, like their colleagues, who could be nominated as an ensemble.

In The Government Inspector, each doll has its own character and human hands with unique plasticity, for which, perhaps, special thanks must be said to Evgeny Ivanov, who answered just that. The trustee of the charitable institutions of Strawberry has a green frock coat and lips, as if in green. He is constantly doing something with his hands, and this creates an additional comic effect. And his actress Natalya Vasilyeva plays. Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky are one character with two heads, some kind of hydra played by Anton Vereshchagin.

The performance has an age limit of 16+. Perhaps because the second act is a bit erotic. Khlestakov does not stand on ceremony there, boldly climbs under the skirt of Marya Antonovna. Well, her mother with incredibly magnificent breasts herself takes off her dress and remains in pantaloons.

Genre of the play “Gogol. Triptych” at the Puppet Theater of Yekaterinburg, the director defined as “ordeals” in one act. In 1 hour and 20 minutes, three short stories are played, which miraculously fit three Gogol’s masterpieces – “The Overcoat”, “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” and “Notes of a Madman”. There are three actors on the stage – German Varfolomeev, Valery Polyanskov, Alexander Shishkin. All of them have been nominated for an award. Everyone has a solo in one of the novels, and in the rest they do everything they can. As in The Inspector General, the possibilities of a live actor, puppets and masks are combined here, but in a completely different way. Igor Kazakov does not repeat himself.

If The Inspector General was about fear, then Triptych was about desecrated human dignity, about which no one spoke better than Gogol. A person is brought to the lowest degree of poverty, and this cripples his consciousness. He is constantly humiliated, he is urged on, and he can become a slave forever. He is driven to the extreme degree of insanity, and he is only capable of a desperate cry.

A dark wall has been erected throughout the scene. It is like a bunker, like a crematorium – different associations arise. In this wall of weeping and sorrow, living and dead souls are sorted into cells. The doors keep opening, and God knows what is thrown out.

The wall becomes the chest of an official, hung with orders and medals. And he himself – no more, no less, a giant gray head and huge fists laid out on a closet. An extremely imaginative and inventive space was created together with the director by talented artists: Olga Dvorovaya and Denis Kozlov.

Bashmachkin will quietly die, as if he had never lived, voluntarily lie down in a coffin, and no one will remember him anymore.

In The Tale of Captain Kopeikin, before our eyes, Valery Polyansky collects his tormented hero from some kind of rubbish, disparate elements, who sacrificed everything for the sake of his homeland and turned out to be unnecessary to her. And Kopeikin will find his last refuge in the wall of the puppet crematorium. Poprishchin will lie in a box lined with white tiles, like Marat.

In this short story, they obviously went overboard with drama and suffering, violating the integrity of the performance. Apparently, the authors were interested in the transformation of a small man who had reached the edge, and he had to grow before our eyes along with his pain. But this did not happen. Drama theater filled the fragile puppet soul. The wall swallowed her up. Who next will rise to the monolith of human indifference?