The Vietnamese theater “Thang Long” gave a four-day series of puppet shows on the stage of the branch of the Theater. Mayakovsky

On the stage of the branch of the Theater. Mayakovsky, a four-day series of puppet shows – five performances a day – was given by the Vietnamese theater “Thang Long”. I was captivated by the outlandish art of water puppetry Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The “World Series” of the Chekhov Festival is very extensive by today’s standards. Which is not surprising: the late Valery Shadrin, the permanent head of Chekhfest, always had a weakness for the art of Southeast Asia, both exotic and avant-garde. That is why a fair part of the program he has compiled is the theaters of loyal states: India, Vietnam and China.

The Vietnamese puppet theater on the water is exotic: this unique art is more than a thousand years old, and it has reached our times in its original form. That is, of course, the performances of the Thang Long Theater, founded in 1969, the owner of various prizes and awards, touring all over the world and conducting serious scientific work to restore the historical repertoire, are not like those ingenuous spectacles that in the old days in the season rains, the peasants had fun, taking a breath after exhausting agricultural work. It is clear that in the distant past there were no such luxurious decorations: a gilded palace with carved outbuildings and a red gable roof, hiding puppeteers behind its facade. That instead of the current stage in the form of a neat pool, there used to be flooded fields; that the characters – people, animals, fantastic creatures – were depicted by garden scarecrows, and not bright, multi-colored, with articulated limbs and expressive physiognomies, wooden dolls that go to the museum after four to six months of service. Yes, and simple rural musicians (performances are given to live accompaniment) dressed without the neat panache of today’s artists.

But the content and form of the village performance have not changed over the millennium. This is still an entertaining divertissement, consisting of short genre scenes. In it, everyday sketches (like the work of planting rice sprouting from under the water before our eyes, or the difficult catching of tasty evasive frogs, or boat races, or catching a fox who is used to stealing ducks) alternate with fabulous, but no less ingenuous and peaceful stories. .

Judging by this idea, Vietnamese folklore is the most good-natured in the world: gilded dragons here do not blaze with anger and fire, but play tag in the foaming water. Multi-colored tailed phoenixes do not die to be reborn, but simply mate: from an egg that floats to the surface after a gentle swimming together, a new small phoenix hatches. And the gods-ancestors, when parting, amicably divide the children and the territory, and the fact that we were shown a divine divorce can only be guessed from the program (the performance is given without subtitles): the dance of six small dolls and two larger dolls, going to gentle singing, can surprise the complexity of the movements, the accuracy of the intervals and the synchronism of the gestures of the articulated arms and heads, but does not betray the acuteness of the situation.

The most intriguing thing about this water puppet theater is the very technique of puppetry. During the performance, the secret of the independent life of dolls in a fenced pool is only partially clarified – an attentive viewer can notice poles attached to figures and objects in the water depths, as well as guess about invisible fishing lines tied to doll hands, heads, feathers. On their bows, the puppeteers, who came out from behind the backdrop-palace, also reveal the circumstances of their hard work – the artists spend the entire 45-minute performance waist-deep in water. But how they manage to turn their poles with such speed and rhythmic variety, how they manage not to get tangled in the fishing lines and achieve such a synchronized “swimming”, how they can move so quickly, being literally hobbled by water, remains a mystery of the millennial theater. One of the most innocent, set by the Chekhov Festival.