Voice from a perverse far away – Newspaper Kommersant No. 40 (7485) dated 03/10/2023

For the 15th time, the Golden Mask Festival has been holding the Mask Plus program, where the curators gather the most curious, in their opinion, performances that were not included in the main competition. The productions of The Life of Spiridon Rastorguev by Philip Gurevich from Nyagan and The Story from Matvey by Oleg Lipovetsky from Kemerovo, shown in Moscow, offered the audience very different views on our recent past and present. Tells Marina Shimadina.

This year, Masks Plus curators, theater critics Ekaterina Ryabova and Aleksandrina Shakleeva, formulated the theme of their program as Noah’s Ark. As the author’s abstract says, “this is what remains today from 20 years of development of modern theater in Russia; what was created thanks to the (miner’s) work of the organizers of drama competitions and director’s laboratories; everything in which other voices sound and other neural connections work. Of the eight performances announced, only five were able to reach Moscow, the rest – “The City of En” by Boris Pavlovich, “Three Terrible Sisters” of the TRU Theater and “My Room” by the art group KREATORZ – were shown at their venues in St. Petersburg and Tyumen.

The same performances that were played directly at the festival, one way or another, worked with the theme of historical memory, the correlation of our present life with the recent Soviet past and the patriarchal foundations living in society. And, interestingly, in the end, the directors came to diametrically opposite conclusions.

In the performance of the Nyagan Youth Theater “The Life of Spiridon Rastorguev”, Philip Gurevich connected Vasily Shukshin’s story “Suraz” with verbatim collected from the surrounding villages of the Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug. The production moves away from stereotypical ideas about the Russian hinterland, about which we actually know amazingly little. Everything that we habitually associate with Shukshin is not here: stoves, benches, red viburnum, huts and quilted jackets … flowers. To match the design and the deliberately conditional existence of artists covered in white makeup. Shukshin’s dialogues here are interspersed with plastic sketches and unexpected musical numbers: David Lang performed by the choir of mourning grandmothers (along with actresses, non-professional volunteers of the “silver” age perform their roles along with actresses) or Depeche Mode played on the accordion. And the episode to the tune of Karvai’s In the Mood for Love directly quotes a scene from Thalheimer’s Emilia Galotti. At other moments, the metaphorical expressionism of Yuri Butusov comes to mind.

But the European formal rigor in the plot of the performance is paradoxically combined with Shukshin’s warmth and humor of documentary scenes, where young artists portray our, today’s old people, very accurately filming their manner of speech, dialect and characteristic features. Here the performance of a completely different school comes to mind – “Grandmothers” by Svetlana Zemlyakova, teacher Philip Gurevich at GITIS.

The ingenuous stories of these people about their, as a rule, difficult fate, about their family, about relatives with whom they will live a century, enter into a dialogue with the story of Spiridon Rastorguev, a reckless village driver “without brakes”, who, in a fit of jealousy and resentment, almost shot a man but ended up shooting himself. The director ironically defines the genre of the performance as “life” – in contrast to the image of a by no means saintly hero who imagines himself to be a superman, to whom everything is allowed. But in the end, “life” is any human life, even the simplest and most unremarkable, if there is a spark of love in it.

“The Story from Matvey” by Oleg Lipovetsky, staged at the Kemerovo Drama Theater of Kuzbass, also sets in a biblical mood with its name. However, this is quite a story of our days – the story of one school class from the decline of the USSR to about the present day. The play by Nina Belenitskaya was first performed in 2016 at the Lyubimovka festival, but even then it clearly indicated the turn to the Soviet past that we are fully experiencing now. Through the history of one class, the whole path of our country is shown – and the first sips of freedom, and the first jeans from America, which suddenly turned from an enemy into a friend, “Santa Barbara” and Chumak on TV, an attempt to coup and seize power on the example of one single school, barricades in classrooms and the victory of democracy. Well, then, having survived the turbulent years of wild capitalism, having lost classmates in the Chechen war and gang wars, the main character returns to his school 20 years later – and again finds himself among slogans and patriotic speeches, in a world of total control and suppression of the individual, where teachers are beaten children with a ruler and threaten to sew up their mouths. Only instead of singing about the party of Lenin, the strength of the people, the prayer of Father Vladimir, a former school informer, sounds.

Oleg Lipovetsky’s performance will take a lot of time and musical tracks, to which the audience, consisting mainly of the same forty-year-olds, reacts with the joy of recognition and even with nostalgia. But at the end of this rather long, verbose and straightforwardly illustrative production, to the song about “Beautiful Far Away”, the director, as if on a silver platter, brings to the audience all our failed lives and lost freedom. So I want to follow the example of Matvey, who dreamed of space since childhood, to sit in a flying saucer and fly away from here to hell.