The sacred relationship “teacher-student” was discussed at the Praktika theater

The intelligentsia’s appeal to the people once again ended in fiasco

Yuri Kvyatkovsky staged the play “Tell Me About Greenland” at the Praktika Theater. The genre is “destruction of the sacred teacher-student relationship.” The result is nothing more than a sketch, as it turned out, and grew from the sketch. The main character, a geography teacher in the capital, makes another awkward visit to the people.

Katerina comes from Moscow to the Far Eastern wilderness with her little son because of life’s troubles, in order to lay low until everything settles down in her difficult fate. In her new place, she wants to be as useful as possible; she believes that she can brighten up the joyless lives of local teenagers, her students. But the angry and conflicted generation does not need her handouts.

Disadvantaged students will remain disadvantaged. Their adult life will not work out. Some will voluntarily die, like the distrustful and evil girl Kira, many will become drunk. Only one student will leave this godforsaken place and visit the fabulous Greenland that the teacher talked about in class.

She is played by Maria Karpova, a very good and versatile actress of the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov, capable of playing both Lyubinka in “The Golovlev Gentlemen” and Serafima Korzukhina in “Running”, successfully acting in films for a variety of directors – in the debut “Nakhodka” by Viktor Dement based on Tendryakov and in “Paradise” by Andrei Konchalovsky, again the debut “ Aquarium” by Ilya Shagalov.

According to her, in “Greenland…” she plays not the physical loss of a child who has become a victim of the students, but the loss of the inner child, obviously within herself, the ability of a person to dream. The geography teacher believes that if even one child escapes poverty, it is worth saving.

The play by Lyalya Petukhova and Sergei Azeev was born from the article by Svetlana Komarova “The key is in the pocket of the dress.” The story grew in the imagination of young authors and resulted in a sketch within the experimental laboratory “Arthab” at the Moscow Art Theater. A.P. Chekhov. Then she was brought to a full-fledged performance at the Moscow Art Theater School. And now a new edition is presented at the Praktika theater. But what looks perfect on the training stage is not always as perfect in “adult” theatrical life.

The very idea of ​​involving young people in the birth of an experimental performance is very good. It involves not only recent students of the acting department of the Moscow Art Theater School from the workshop of Marina Brusnikina and Sergei Shchedrin, but also aspiring artists from the scenography department – Marina Motornaya, Stepan Lysenko and Tatyana Osipova, Roman Reshetnikov. Under the leadership of Yuri Kvyatkovsky, they came up with an eerie and spectacular habitat, a real chthon, for the heroes of the play.

The characters – mostly provincial school teachers – seem to step into headless plaster figures. Their heads are strung on the skeletons of motionless bodies. They move like puppets, joining the tragic carnival of provincial life. Particularly good are the school director Evgenia Stepanovna, played by Elizaveta Orlova, and the schoolboy Vanya’s mother, Alena Vasina, who routinely repeats the phrase that their son is good. They shake their doll heads like ancient porcelain beauties.

Many horror stories have been created about provincial horror. But if we talk about serious statements on a given topic, then perhaps the most powerful film in recent times has been the film “A Simple Pencil” by Natalya Nazarova, where Nadezhda Gorelova’s heroine, a St. Petersburg artist, comes to a distant Siberian village following her husband serving time in a colony. She gets a job as an art teacher at a local school where the children of pencil factory workers study.

The story is made up, but every time viewers in different cities are interested in how the filmmakers learned about their specific fate. And there the teacher is trying to save at least one child in the village.

Nadezhda Gorelova said: her father dreamed that his daughter would become an architect, and she drew heads and draperies with a pencil. Almost like in “Practice” – both the heads and the draperies… The two young heroes in “A Simple Pencil”, thanks to the capital’s art teacher, will break into another life and will no longer want to live according to the cruel laws of their village. This means that it is still worth going to the people at the cost of your own losses. In the Greenland version this raises serious doubts.