Ursulyak made his debut in theater directing, staging a play based on the works of Schwartz
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Sergei Ursulyak, who directed “Russian Ragtime”, “The Righteous Man”, “Liquidation”, “Quiet Don” and “Bad Weather”, made his debut on the theater stage – at Sretenka, at the Theater. Vl. Mayakovsky. He defined the genre of the play “Another Fairy Tale” as “fooling around with meaning based on the plays of Evgeniy Schwartz.”
At the beginning of the season, Mayakovka artistic director Yegor Peregudov recalled how Galina Volchek talked about the possibility of inviting Sergei Ursulyak to a production of Sovremennik. It didn’t happen for various reasons. As Ursulyak himself told MK, he never had a desire to stage in the theater. Three or four similar proposals were received a year, but he always answered them: “It’s not a film director’s job to stage it in the theater.” However, Peregudov convinced him to try it as an experiment. “The troupe is good, the artists are wonderful. If I don’t let you down, everything will end well,” said the director, getting to work. This is what he said about the young cast of the series “Quiet Flows the Don,” which gave rise to doubts among many: “If young and talented actors don’t play, then it’s only me to blame.”
For the first time, he had to choose the best actors not from the whole country, but from a separate troupe, for which Ursulyak became a litmus test, revealing its advantages and disadvantages.
It seems that he invented the genre of “fooling around” in order to lay out straws, to protect himself in case of failure, since he had to start from scratch. Ursulyak graduated from the Shchukin Theater School and worked as an artist at Satyricon for more than ten years before devoting himself entirely to cinema. His wife Lika Nifontova, daughters Alexandra and Daria Ursulyak are wonderful theater actresses. So the theater never left his life, but returning to the stage himself, and even in a new capacity, was not easy.
In the theater program, Ursulyak expressed gratitude to Robert Sturua, Konstantin Raikin and Alexander Shirvindt “for nurturing an artistic worldview.” In this case, it could not have happened without the influence of Mark Zakharov and his “Ordinary Miracle”.
Ursulyak found the material for the production himself. The choice was not surprising, since he is an adherent of Soviet drama, and Schwartz is close to him in spirit and corresponds to today’s state of mind. To “The Naked King”, written in 1934 based on the fairy tales “The King’s New Clothes”, “The Swineherd”, “The Princess and the Pea” by Andersen, added “Shadow” (this is already 1937-1940), “Dragon” (1942-1944 ), fragments of the film script “Cain XVIII”, written by Schwartz together with Nikolai Erdman.
Sergei Ursulyak approached Schwartz’s plays freely, went through them length and breadth, and partially expounded them in his own words. “The king said that we are the best nation in the world, and we have completely forgotten other languages!” – this is how the adapted text now sounds. The weavers are snitches here.
And the young actor Mamuka Patarava, who played Christian, parodies Grigory Leps.
In our recent interview, the director said: “I am not an experimentalist, but a traditionalist. I won’t have riot police. This is a retrograde production, not fashionable art, of which I have never been a representative. The beauty of Schwartz is that he is always in place.”
Ursulyak urged the first viewers to be lenient: “Behind the scenes, 25 people are ready to commit suicide. Save their lives.” The main problem, apparently, was the impossibility of recording the desired result, because any rehearsal, and now every performance, is something ephemeral. “Every time I come to the rehearsals, I understand that I have a chance to see a completely new and different performance. Rarely does this change make you happy, more often it makes you sad. I am amazed at theater directors who live to be 50 years old. This is a job for which you need to pay separately. They should retire at 45, like ballet workers,” said Sergei Ursulyak after the first show.
According to him, in cinema an artist is required to have at least one successful take. Then the director combines it with another successful take by another artist. And in the theater yesterday something happened for one, today for another,
and it is unknown what will happen tomorrow. Ursulyak told the actors, not without irony, that a disaster awaited him. Apparently, he will refrain from further experiments in the theater for now. What will happen to the previously planned “Eugene Onegin” at the Bolshoi Theater after the change of management is unclear. Although work with the artist is already underway.
For “Another Fairy Tale,” set designer Evgenia Shutina built the most ordinary fairy-tale space that we see in children’s performances. Unless the ladies-in-waiting come out in tunics. Combined with a deep neckline, the result is a spectacle on the edge.
Princess Henrietta in a short teenage dress (Alena Vasina) fell in love with the commoner Henry (Nikita Yazykov). For what? God knows. He’s kind of a klutz and she’s sexy. In “An Ordinary Miracle” by Mark Zakharov, the princess was played by Evgenia Simonova, the most tender of princesses. Now her daughter Zoya Kaidanovskaya plays the masculine queen, whose appearance with a gun produces an unexpected effect. She is not satisfied with her daughter’s choice, and she will quickly find her a worthy groom in the neighboring kingdom. It doesn’t matter that he’s not young, doesn’t have much intelligence, he’s just a fool, and you can’t call him handsome. But even she will quickly understand that the king is naked. He was masterfully played by Vyacheslav Kovalev, who has a rare natural organic quality. The king is susceptible to flattery, and the First Minister – Evgeny Paramonov – constantly cuts the truth “directly, rudely, like an old man”, that he is the crown of creation.
The young princess is not ready for such a marriage. Henry and his friend Christian carry out an operation to save her: they dress up as gendarmes and weavers, sewing a suit for the king from fabric invisible to fools. Young people always win. The future is behind them. They are on the side of light, not darkness, although there are exceptions.
Newspaper headline:
A tale of Soviet retrograde
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