The Russian Youth Theater released “Leningrad Tales” by Philip Gurevich

The Russian Youth Theater (RAMT) released “Leningrad Tales” – a large-scale tragic opus based on the books of the same name by Yulia Yakovleva, directed by Philip Gurevich. Tells Marina Shimadina.

The repertoire strategy of RAMT in recent years is worthy of respect: after a series of performances about fascism and totalitarianism (“Brown Morning” for children, “Wave” for teenagers and “Leopoldstadt” for adults), Molodezhny releases “Leningrad Tales” – a mystical saga about the tragic past of our country, shown through the eyes of children. Two brothers and a sister lose their parents, go through war, blockade and evacuation, through fear and despair, trying to hide from the horror of what is happening in a fantasy world.

Yulia Yakovleva’s pentalogy has become one of the main phenomena of modern teenage literature, won many awards, and the first book of the series, “The Raven’s Children,” was staged several times in theaters. But no one has yet decided to bring the entire series to life on stage. Director Philip Gurevich and playwright Maria Malukhina tried to “compact” several books into one performance as part of the “Staging Workshop”, held at RAMT last season. This ambitious mission seemed obviously impossible: it was impossible to fit so many events and meanings into one production. Based on “Leningrad Tales,” three full-fledged performances can be made and played on three evenings, like Stoppard’s already legendary “The Shore of Utopia” or “Three Fat Men” at the Bolshoi Drama Theater. But RAMT decided on radical pressing.

Maria Malukhina tried to connect several books into one story from 1941 to 1945 (from “Children of the Raven”, where the action takes place in the 1930s, there was only one flashback with the arrest of the parents). And although in the end the performance runs for almost four hours with two intermissions, the staging still leaves the feeling of a quick retelling, and many scenes are simply incomprehensible without knowledge of the original source.

But it’s not for nothing that “Three Fat Men” by Andrei Moguchy was mentioned – Philip Gurevich does not hide the fact that he was guided by this fantastic dystopia. And he borrowed from there, first of all, an illogical, metaphorical way of artistic expression. His performance is structured not as a narrative, sometimes confusing and incomprehensible, like the speech of a shell-shocked person, but as a kaleidoscope of pictures and images – sharp, paradoxical, etched in the memory.

Here, for example, is the line at a bakery in besieged Leningrad, where people with gray, erased faces hold on to each other, like Bruegel’s blind men. And the idyllic scene of memories of parents refers to “The Lovers” by Magritte. A pair of athletes in white, like animated sculptures of ideal Soviet people, go off to “beat the enemy” and return drooping and bloodied. The lipstick on the lips of the nurses from the executed train also turns into blood – these young nymphs in bows and ballet skirts, who clearly have no place in this hell, among the corpses and stumps of legs.

The roles of the three main characters – Tanya, Shurka and Bobka – are perfectly performed by Tatyana Matyukhova, Vladimir Zomerfeld and Alexey Bobrov. They don’t play children: they denote their age with masks, with the help of conventional makeup and awkward plasticity, but they each have their own theme – the responsibility of the older Tanya, serious beyond her years (“I can’t forgive myself”), the orphaned melancholy of little Bobka (“I’m so tired to love again”) and Shurka’s truth-seeking (“I’m angry that people can be happy now”). Antonina Pisareva has to play her adopted son Sarah with only her eyes – her character does not speak. But the director came up with an amazing move for her: the girl learns to play the violin and, passing the bow across her throat, tries to extract at least some sound from herself. “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed comes out, but Philip Gurevich’s play, as always, has a pile of musical tracks from baroque to modern Western pop, and this is the most controversial moment of the production after its dramaturgy.

But the scenography was a success. Together with artists Anna Agafonova and Anton Troshin, the creators came up with a mystical forest that becomes not so much a refuge for children as a place of initiation. In the other world, the one-eyed god Odin reigns, united in two faces: he is played by two aged actors – Alexey Blokhin and Tatyana Kuryanova, dressed in children’s suits. By eating candy, where people’s names and surnames are written on the candy wrappers, they draw a line under their lives. Adults cannot return back from here, but for children the border is permeable – their teddy bear becomes their guide between the worlds. On the other side, he doesn’t look so cute and even scary – half toy, half man in a bear mask and a classic suit (Alexey Golikov). He was tired of enduring the rudeness and familiarity of his little masters, but even more tired of losing them. Therefore, breaking the law of the balance of worlds, this time he saves children from inevitable cold death by throwing himself into a dying stove.

Sooner or later, each of them will have to make a terrible choice and make a sacrifice – to give up what is most precious, to take up a weapon and kill for real, to forget the past in order to live on… But in the last act, when only one tree remains from the fairy-tale forest on stage knowledge of good and evil, over which the cold stars of the Victory salutes burn, it will become clear that it is impossible to forget what befell the heroes. All of them, children and adults, are irreparably traumatized and cannot start life again. “Wars never end,” says a tired Odin in the finale. And reality immediately confirms his words: on the day of the premiere of Leningrad Tales, during the last intermission, the audience and actors learned about the terrorist attack in Crocus. But they decided to finish the play, because that’s exactly what it’s about – about the confrontation with death, which sometimes love still wins.