Theater from Minusinsk showed Russian trash

True story, great performance

A theater that is older than the Moscow Art Theater has arrived in Moscow – a drama from distant and cold Minusinsk. He celebrated his 140th birthday at the Directing Lessons festival, presenting the play The Mischievous Man based on the novel by Mamin-Sibiryak to the capital’s audience.

The theater was founded by the descendants of the Decembrists, in 1880 it first appeared as a musical and dramatic society under the leadership of Olympiad Volkonskaya. Fans who acted out performances would now be called cultural tregers in the godforsaken Siberian region. The theater, which was built by the whole world, pooled together, survived the fire in 1931, but nevertheless continued to work – during the war, the artists performed in hospitals, supporting the morale of the soldiers. Now, while the construction of a new building is being completed, performances are being held at the local cultural center.

For ten years, the cultural agenda, the repertoire has been determined and shaped by director Alexei Pesegov, an adherent of the Russian realistic theater. Until recently, in the capital and advanced regions, this word was almost abusive, a synonym for naphthalene, broken moth, but the changed circumstances in which the country now lives are changing assessments and, it seems, returning the lost positions to the traditional theater. There comes an understanding that realistic theater, however, like modern theater, can be either good or bad, and adherence to fashion trends does not save innovators, whose performances often look mothballed. The drama from Minusinsk showed the best version at the Directing Lessons festival.

The plot of the story “The Mischievous” at the present time is just trash. A story uninvented by metropolitan drama makers about provincial life unknown to them, and therefore terrible in its truth. The mischievous one is the bean Spirka, who lives in the village of Separate. Spirka fell in love with Dunka, a married immigrant from Ryazan. A man without tenderness, in a fit of feelings, scolds Dunka as a “fool” and each statement, regardless of who it is addressed to, ends like this: “Bestial nose and a cap.” But Dunka made Spirka’s “dummy” such that the peasant is unable to cope with it – he toils from love, he does not find a place for himself.

Rigid morals, firm foundations, the violation of which is severely punished. In the memoirs of the artist Konstantin Korovin, who from childhood hunted in the forests of the Moscow province and every summer lived in villages near Moscow, I came across a story that made my blood run cold. Just because the bridegroom returned the bride to her parents the next day after the wedding, because she turned out to be spoiled, the father and two brothers methodically beat the stumbled woman for two months until they beat her to death – this is how they washed away the shame in Russia more than a hundred years ago from family and village. Subsequently, the official Soviet history summarized: “The fate of the Russian woman in the days of tsarism was hard.”

To tell it to the modern viewer in conventional language means to turn it into something abstract. Realistic theater is the best way to respect the historical truth and convey the truth of the characters. Therefore, the scene is empty, only the forest is conditional in the form of fourteen black boards descending from above twice. It was in them that the rough but sincere love of Spirka got lost, for which he later paid with his life.

Everything on the stage is ascetic: a northern melodic melody, a simple women’s and men’s costume (sarafans, scarves, loose-fitting shirts). And the performance of the actors of the Minusinsk Theater is also seemingly simple, only this simplicity is deadly in the deep truth about life in Russia – which was and continues. This true story has a sobering effect on the viewer of the 21st century, especially in the capital, who does not even allow the thought of violating gender equality.