Two premieres of plays by English playwright Tom Stoppard took place

Two premieres of plays by the great English playwright Tom Stoppard took place in the capitals of the Baltic countries within one evening of each other: John Malkovich staged the recently written Leopoldstadt at the Riga Dailes Theater, and Yuri Butusov released Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Vilnius Old Theater. . I visited two capitals, like two different theater planets. Esther Steinbock.

The theme of human destiny is certainly one of the most important in Stoppard’s work. Two directors (although John Malkovich is still primarily an actor, and his directing is precisely “actor’s” – as a director he presents not his imagination, but his human and acting experience) and two theaters, without saying a word, seemed to stretch this through thread of Stoppard’s creativity from opposite sides. John Malkovich – and this is a very obvious choice – proposed the latest play by the now 86-year-old Stoppard, Leopoldstadt, which in Britain is almost officially considered the swan song of the living classic of English-language drama. Yuri Butusov remembered the play through which Stoppard’s name first made headlines more than half a century ago – “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” turned inside out. The director’s idea, which arose a couple of years ago, was realized not at all where it was conceived and discussed, but in the Vilnius Old Theater, which just last year was called the Russian Theater – this alone has already made the theme of fate and human choice even more pressing. Thus, two events took place: in Riga – almost socio-political and state, in Vilnius – artistic and humanitarian.

When Stoppard wrote the paraphrase of Shakespeare’s tragedy, he did not yet know the secret of his origins and his family, most of whose members were victims of the Holocaust. “Leopoldstadt” was the delayed result of his personal discoveries – Stoppard himself, in the last act of the play, showed himself as a young Englishman arriving in 1955 at an apartment in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, where his family lived, almost all of whom died in Nazi camps. The action spans more than half a century, and Stoppard gives us a detailed look at several generations of that Jewish family before disaster strikes in the late 1930s. John Malkovich follows the author, slowly and in detail unfolding a multi-figured and verbose exposition in the best traditions of the theater of the last century. In this story, almost devoid of rhythmic changes and conscientiously performed by the troupe of the Dailes Theater, part of the public, brought up on the restless and perky modern director’s theater, does not find any interest.

Of course, when at the end of the performance all the victims appear on stage like shadows, tears are wiped away in the audience. But the interest of both the playwright and the director is different: to show life, which, as we already know, is moving towards destruction caused by external violence. Was it possible to change something in that peaceful bourgeois reality in order to avoid death? Is it possible, like children at a theatrical matinee, to “suggest” something to the characters so that they see the danger and discern evil in time? Of course not. So are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from another play by Stoppard – they always go through forks in the road, try to guess them and restore the chain of events, but they are always late and inevitably approach their own death.

However, Yuri Butusov makes the main character of his play not the inseparable (and ill-fated) duet of Hamlet’s two already battered by life, forever frightened university friends (Dmitry Denisyuk and Igor Abramovich), but the Actor. Here, played by Valentin Novopolsky, he is not just the leader of a traveling troupe, but the author of all the intrigue, one might say, the organizer of this whole strange performance, taking place unknown when and unclear where. No, of course, it’s clear when all this happens: now, but not in reality, but in restless dreams. It is the Actor who, when asked what times are now, answers: “Unimportant.” And again, people torment themselves and those around them with questions about how what happened happened, and whether there were any forks in the road that each individual could not or did not want to recognize.

Butusov leaves aside the plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which is important for Stoppard. The author of the “original source” is present indirectly: in the production of the Old Theater there are obvious references to the Shakespearean performances of Eimuntas Nekrosius, primarily to “Hamlet”. An homage to a very important director for Butusov in Vilnius looks appropriate and beautiful. Moreover, “Rosenkrantz…” was designed by Marius Nyakrosius, the son and student of the great Lithuanian master.

His work is laconic and voluminous: ropes descending from under the grate with weights attached to them from below sometimes hang like ship sails, sometimes tremble with strings, sometimes fold into a half-open theater curtain. In this “theater”, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first act out the show themselves, endlessly tossing the falling coin – in violation of the theory of probability and common sense – with the same side, and then look from the side at themselves, playing with fate and dying at its hands.

Yuri Butusov staged a play about theater as fate, and, probably, he would have the right to do this at any moment. But now this play is also about fate as a theater, where what is invisible to ordinary eyes is visible, where the public strives to save on tickets, and where not a single worthwhile plot can remain bloodless. Butusov, as he knows how, either “sublimates” rhythms and sounds to the limits of what is bearable, or is distracted by some particulars that grow into individual impressive episodes, or amazes and delights with metaphorical mise-en-scenes – like those sitting at a table and scraping stones from their their own portraits of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. No one survives in this story, not even Horatio, who Butusov doesn’t have at all. Picturesquely, theatrically, the title characters kill the many-faced Actor, and after him, all the other characters cover themselves with clothes and litter the stage with their motionless bodies, and white shirts float up on ropes, which until recently were put on in many layers, like cabbage leaves. R. and G.

In general, the theme of fate today concerns not only the characters, but also the theaters themselves. The Riga “Diles” not only received a sonorous name on the poster, but also, thanks to Stoppard, spoke out with moral benefit on the painful topic for the Baltic countries of keeping silent about complicity in the Holocaust. The Vilnius theater, which was forced last year to remove the term “Russian” from its name, is itself looking for a survival strategy – today it has few allies and too many opportunistic ill-wishers. It is unlikely that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will save it, but if Lithuania has not yet lost the ability to count not only political, but also artistic points, then the Old Theater should be awarded the victory.