There is no shadow for a shadow – Newspaper Kommersant No. 31 (7476) dated 02/18/2023

In Athens, on the stage of the Onassis Cultural Center, they showed the play “In the solitude of the cotton fields” based on the play by Bernard-Marie Coltes directed by Timofey Kulyabin. Attended the Athens premiere Andrey Plakhov.

Written in 1985, this play of the “gloomy angel” of French dramaturgy was born of that era – the era of flaming postmodernity and sexual counter-revolution, which took the form of the AIDS epidemic (Coltes died of this disease four years later). This context, which also colored the work of Patrice Chereau, an intimate friend of Coltes and the first director of The Cotton Fields, largely determines the gloomy atmosphere of the play, painted as a dialogue between the Seller and the Buyer of the most scarce commodity in the world – a dangerous and forbidden desire.

In the version of 2022 proposed by Timofey Kulyabin, desire becomes not only even more dangerous, but also criminal. We understand this by decorations and accessories: a toy castle, a children’s drawing and a slipper. But the “goods” are never called words: the Seller and the Buyer beat around the bush, philosophize and spread their thoughts along the tree, avoiding the taboo topic in every possible way. This verbal balancing act in the tradition of the French existential-poetic drama, from Sartre and Genet to Marguerite Duras, gives great scope for performers, although it requires high tension and impact from them.

The director found the ideal executors of his plan in the person of John Malkovich and Ingeborga Dapkunaite. Firstly, this is a well-coordinated duet polished on joint projects. Partners feel each other to such subtleties that they merge into a single artistic organism, when it doesn’t cost them anything to change roles, which happens at a certain moment. This fully corresponds to the concept of the production, according to which two arguing interlocutors exist in a bipolar world, in the painful subconscious of the same hero possessed by demons. Secondly, if Malkovich – and this has long been known – is a chameleon actor capable of the most incredible reincarnations, then Dapkunaite in this performance showed herself to be an equally flexible actress, for whom there are no boundaries of role, character and even gender.

Both characters are unified not only by masculine make-up, hairstyle and clothing: shirt, trousers, suspenders, but also by the manner of pronouncing the text, although written in French, but victoriously demonstrating the intonation richness and luxury of the English language in translation. According to Patrice Chereau, this is generally a special language, because Koltes “all the time seems to be translating from the” black “harlem American language; he has an invented, non-existent French language – French dreamed by an American.

The scenography of the performance (artist Oleg Golovko) is laconic and multifunctional. Eight doors are transformed into images of enclosed spaces – a shower cabin, an elevator, a closet; each of these images has a psychoanalytic interpretation, they are all associated with the sphere of the repressed subconscious. But the most radical solution was found on the path seemingly traveled by modern theater: the use of the screen and close-up has long become a commonplace. However, the fact of the matter is that another performance can, at worst, do without on-screen commentary, but this one cannot. And in general, this is not a commentary at all, but a parallel plot, as if duplicating the main one, but actually entering into a sharp dialogue with it, like a Seller with a Buyer.

No wonder this story was shot with six cameras: hence the depth and fullness of the frame, as if living its own mysterious autonomous life. You watch this performance as if with four eyes, trying to find the right focus, balancing between live actors and screen shadows, in which the magical underside of their physical image is revealed. The dialogue between stage and screen echoes the disputes of man, this crown of creation, with his eternally dissatisfied, vicious and suicidal shadow side.