The plays became an echo – Kommersant

In the German capital, at the ACUD-Theater, a festival of new dramaturgy “Echo of Lyubimovka” was held. Why did he become a wanderer, what does he have to do with the previously famous “Lubimovka” and what is encouraging, tells Alla Shenderova.

The festival, which acquaints the public with new plays, was founded by playwrights and critics back in 1990, when the late Soviet, and then Russian theater experienced a severe dramatic avitaminosis. Lyubimovka, which for more than two decades determined the repertoire of Russian theater and partly cinema, gave the world new texts – from Russians Mikhail Ugarov and Ivan Vyrypaev to Ukrainians Maxim Kurochkin and Natalia Vorozhbit, Belarusians Pavel Pryazhko and Dmitry Bogoslavsky – has gone through all the ups and downs of our modern history. . But in July 2022, she announced that she could not take place in Moscow. In the autumn of 2022, the readings, called “Echo of Lyubimovka”, took place at the Kazakh theater ARTiSHOCK, then in Narva, Tartu, Yekaterinburg, Tbilisi, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Paris, Belgrade and Istanbul. Each city has its own organizing committee and its own plays from the list of those that were sent to the Lyubimovki competitions in 2022 and earlier.

“Good weather. Very good. The sun is shining and warm. Yes, and my Vanechka is alive and well” — in Natalia Lizorkina’s play “Vanya is alive” this text is written in the form of a dialogue between the heroine and her neighbor. But the play itself is preceded by the author’s comment that it should be performed by one voice. Police officers, passers-by, a judge, a camp doctor, convicts – a stranger stands out in the crowd of characters, telling Alya by phone that her son “is not in captivity, but is completely free” and that “Vanya will return.” “I am a soldier’s mother, I have the right to know how he got free,” the mother argues, but the stranger hangs up. In the next scene, Alya is burying an empty coffin. And the audience present at the reading understands that the text appeals to our genetic memory: all words have a direct meaning, and sometimes the opposite, and only the heirs of homo soveticus know when and what meaning to read. The author extends this habit of total shifting to his remarks. And when a beggar with children appears in the text, whom the author calls “well-fed and healthy,” we are not surprised that Alya, torn by misfortune, that is, “completely happy,” calls them into the house and feeds them cookies.

Director Filipp Grigoryan offered Lizorkina’s minimalist play to Berlin-based actress and translator Maria Zharkova, who translated and performed it in German, pausing so that some of the audience could read the Russian text on the screen. There are no sounds other than a voice, but it seems that the pauses literally ring with grief.

The Berlin “Echo” became not only trilingual (English, German, Russian), but also international in terms of the composition of the performers. The text of Aleksey Zhitkovsky “Battle for Mosul” was directed by the Syrian Vasim Alsharki, and read by German actors.

“Our army is not fighting in Iraq… We have a peaceful army, and the purpose of our army is to bring peace to the whole world. And if there is a war going on somewhere, it means that it is not us, we a priori cannot carry the war, because we bring peace.” Written in 2017 (immediately after the battle for Mosul) and then criticized for being “irrelevant”, the text, in which people with machine guns who want to avenge their murdered relatives rush into the townsfolk who do not know anything about the war, became one of the discoveries of a two-day reading. I was also struck by the professional and human level of the German actors who took part in the discussions and admitted that the position of non-intervention is very characteristic of German society as well.

Four of the eight texts selected by the organizing committee (playwrights Polina Borodina, Mikhail Kaluzhsky and Nadya Fro, producer Maria Krupnik, directors Yuri Shekhvatov and Oleg Khristolyubsky) were conceived and written at different times before the spring of last year. But, taken together, right now they form a whole picture. Bullying and annihilation of the soul in the army (“The Unknown Soldier” by Artem Maternal), the desperate struggle of a Tatar woman for her independence (“Mugallima” by Dina Safina), “The Battle for Mosul”, revealing the mechanism of our indifference to what has long been smoldering and preparing, “ Border” by Sergey Davydov is an almost verbatim dialogue between the author and his mother, who was once forced to flee Tajikistan, and now persuades her son that “everything is not so simple.” Finally, “Text for the Theatre: A Work to Remove Intellectual Corruption” by Vikenty Bryz, whose heroine “a simple Russian girl Nancy Drogovich tied in a knot” is trying to survive in the love / hate that connects her with the 145 million population of the country.

And yet the texts, some of which turned into excellent sketches, could still remain a “cabal”. Everything changed “Women in the Dark” – a text presented in English by Kievites Masha Denisova and Irina Serebryakova, compiled from personal diaries, chats and correspondence in social networks, which were conducted by the inhabitants of Kiev last winter and autumn.

“Try to live your life in such a way that you don’t know the taste of Doshirak brewed yesterday”; “My new stylish accessory is a headlamp” – German director Satchel Reemtsma turned these texts into an excellent performance played by Josephine Witt and Denise Wolf. Manky and plastic, at first they were visible only while the matches were lit. The more attentively the spectator listened to the text and the more eagerly he glared at the dimly lit scene.

It is difficult to overestimate the dignity with which Irina Serebryakova spoke at the discussion. And the fact that the representatives of Russia and Ukraine were able to carry on a dialogue – even in a crowded small hall of the German theater that hosted the festival of Russian-language plays – gives hope.