The plot for a big performance – Newspaper Kommersant No. 25 (7470) dated 02/10/2023

The festival “Golden Mask-2023” opened with an out-of-competition trump card: “The Seagull” of the St. Petersburg Maly Drama Theater – the Theater of Europe. The fresh premiere of Lev Dodin was shown as part of the new out-of-competition program of the Master festival. And no other performance would be better suited for this, he believes. Marina Shimadina.

The new program “Master”, which appeared only this year, presents, as the festival’s website says, productions and their creators, “consisting outside the competition framework and nominations”, “who have changed our view of theatrical art and ourselves.” The patriarch of the Russian scene, Lev Dodin, without a doubt, is the first on the list. But the “Master” is not an honorary award “for merit” for directors who have retired and rest on their laurels. Lev Abramovich will still give odds to the young, releasing sniper-accurate and virtuoso performances every year. At the last Golden Mask festival, his laconic-sharp “The Brothers Karamazov” became one of the hits of the program. I have no doubt that the current “Seagull” will enter the competition next season. It was done really skillfully, soberly and ruthlessly. Without mercy to himself, to the actors and to the audience. Without hope of salvation – and paradoxically this salvation being.

Lev Dodin already staged The Seagull in 2001, more than 20 years ago: then Arkadina was the director’s wife Tatyana Shestakova, and the beginning Ksenia Rappoport played the role of Nina Zarechnaya. The witch’s lake overflowed on the stage with a dirty flowering swamp, and all the actors pedaled bicycles. In the current production there are “greetings” to the predecessor – for example, a home theater curtain sewn from duvet covers. But the general light coloring has changed to a gloomy black.

Instead of a green puddle and bicycles by Alexei Porai-Koshits, wooden boats rock on a dark artificial surface in Alexander Borovsky’s scenography. Nervous, broken Treplev (Nikita Karataev), a lover of new forms, arranges a theater on the water here. And the actors balance throughout the first act, jumping from one boat to another. Unsteady, dangerous, unstable, there is no solid ground under your feet. The heroes are trying to keep their balance, not to fall into this black abyss, to stay afloat, desperately clinging to life, to love, to each other. But here, as on the Titanic, every man for himself.

If in the first half of the performance the quiet splash of water, the romances and bright outfits of Arkadina still deceived with summer serenity, then the second one is doused with cosmic cold. The boats lie upside down and look like tombstones, monuments to bygone youth, foolish hopes. The witch’s lake is frozen, the wind is whistling, the heroes are chilly wrapping themselves in coats, but they cannot warm each other. “Empty, empty, empty. Scary, scary, scary.”

Dodin’s new production is just as laconic and austere as The Brothers Karamazov, where the director made an elegant composition for seven main characters from a huge novel with a heap of plots and characters. In The Seagull, he also removed secondary roles, leaving only those between whom invisible threads of tension are stretched. The text is also recut in jewelry – the lines of some characters are given to others and therefore sound even more biting. “After Tolstoy or Turgenev, you won’t read Trigorin,” Treplev throws right in the face of the famous writer. Nothing is hidden here at all, everything is in public: Nina coos with Trigorin in front of Arkadina, and she reads her love letter with an evil mockery: “If you ever need my life, come and take it.”

Arkadina (beautiful Elizaveta Boyarskaya) is still young and pretty here, but immediately feels in Nina (Anna Zavtur) a dangerous rival. She fights for Trigorin – faded and shabby played by Igor Chernevich – fully armed with female charms and acting talent. She plays the famous scene of seduction for show – they say, watch and learn, girl. But on the other hand, truly sincerely, with feeling, Arkadina reads Masha’s monologue from “Three Sisters” as one of her roles. (It is interesting that it is Masha Boyarskaya who is now playing in MDT.) And the words “I love, love, love this person”, spoken on behalf of Masha Prozorova, sound more true to her than in life. This is the main paradox of both Arkadina and other people of art in this performance. They live only on the stage or in their compositions, they are real there, and reality becomes only consumable material for creativity.

Trigorin constantly walks around here with a notebook and fixes all the characters’ replicas, so that in the finale he wearily raises his hand with the finished play – “The Seagull. Comedy”. And it becomes clear why the text of the performance was so redrawn and why quotations from Chekhov’s letters appeared in it. It was not a play cast for centuries in collected works, but raw, life itself, which formed its basis. But the “plot for a short story” here is the broken fates of those who could not find refuge in the second reality – who exist here and now, in the rough, unbearable present.

The pitiful and ridiculous Medvedenko (Oleg Ryazantsev) gives Trigorin his “thing” – a stuffed seagull, made to his order. The bird that Treplev had shot was ugly, bloody, repulsive in its naturalism. But the scarecrow turned out to be clean, neat, in a word – nature morte. So Trigorin and Arkadina, and then with Zarechnaya, become such “taxidermists” – they turn life, their own and their loved ones, into Kunstwerk. “I feel that for the honey that I give to someone, I collect dust from my best flowers, tear the very flowers and trample their roots,” Trigorin admits to Nina. And she, in turn, is ready to give everything for loud fame, for a place in the pantheon of celestials – and she really gives, loses her lover and child, but becomes a real actress. And in the finale, he already meaningfully, deeply reads his monologue of the World Soul. Art, like a cruel deity, requires constant sacrifices from its priests, and they are ready to make them, because this is the only way they are saved from the terrible reality. And for those who are not lucky enough to find their way in creativity, it remains only to shoot themselves.