“This is not a biopic. The performance does not even include Mayakovsky himself.

So on the eve of the premiere, the director of the play “Without galoshes is more elegant” Teresa Durova said.

But what is there? A lot of music, unique poetry, exclusive jazz, incredible costumes, amazing acting, the spirit and time of the beginning of the last century and … the absence of a hero as such.

“Mayakovsky is a genius who brilliantly lived his short, very eventful life. He lived at a time when “the world dislocated a joint,” in the words of Shakespeare. And if he appeared today, he would be a very famous blogger. He was a man with a very good natural taste, who was originally born as a leader, a tribune. He has such blood. Internal state plus Georgian childhood. He had a natural sense of style,” Teresa Durova told about the work on the performance of one of my colleagues.

“It’s more elegant without galoshes” – this line from the advertising text of Vladimir Mayakovsky became the title of the production at the Teresa Durova Theater. Not a banal reading of the biography of the great poet was presented by the director of the performance and the creative team of the production. In their interpretation, Mayakovsky is a fashionista, a brutal poet, a multi-level lover who, with his incredible rhymes, drove not only revolutionary young ladies crazy.

On the eve of the 130th anniversary of the birth of the “revolutionary” poet Mayakovsky, a fashionable workshop was built on the stage of the Durova Theater, where jackets, dresses and trousers are cut and sewn, which will later become a “visual aid” of the era. It was Mayakovsky in the poetic sense who created that very era.

The actors of the production, dressed in fashion (artist Viktoria Sevryukova) of the beginning of the last century (jackets with bright vests, trousers with arrows, wide-brimmed hats) argue about the very poet who is not on stage. And all this to the incredibly beautiful and timeless music (composer Sergey Kondratyev), and even together with instrumental jazz performed by the theater sextet.

David Burliuk, in a red top hat with a monocle in his eye, reads poetry (there are 30 of them in the production), just like his stage partners – Lifshchits, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, but without Yesenin. All these futurists periodically “leave” their characters to become one of the five Mayakovskys. That is how many (lyrical, eccentric, plastic, insolent, offender) there are in the play, according to the idea of ​​director Teresa Durova.

“It’s more elegant without galoshes – that’s a lie! All the elegance comes from our galoshes” – actors Rufat Akchurin, Sergei Batov, Mikhail Buber, Pavel Povalikhin and Georgy Shabanov present these and other lines of the poet Mayakovsky to the audience in an emotional, theatrical, eccentric and witty way.

At the end of the production, one of the Mayakovskys reads a fragment from “A Cloud in Pants”, turning to God – this is the most unexpected and discussed (later – on the sidelines and by reviewers) scene of the play.

Well, Durova would not have been Teresa Gannibalovna if she hadn’t looped everything philosophically – Little son came to his father and asked the baby: “What is good? And what is bad? – the hall picked up lines familiar from childhood and literally “drowned” the artists in applause.

“An exciting journey in the style of jazz through the world of fashion and sensual poetry” – this is how the performance “Without galoshes is more elegant” is described by director Tereza Durova. And for the production team, this journey turned out to be at least not banal, but at most – a musical and poetic masterpiece.

Svetlana Yurieva.

Photo by Sergey Vinogradov