Zhitinkin directed Chekhov’s detective story – MK

Who the “killer” was was unclear to those who had not read the story until recently

Andrei Zhitinkin staged seven performances at the Maly Theater. Last year, in the production of “The Cranes Are Flying,” based on Rozov’s play, a couple separated by war, Boris and Veronica, were played by Andrei Chernyshev and Varvara Shatalova. The duet seemed successful not only to the audience, but also to the director himself, so we saw these actors again in the premiere play “My Tender Beast.” In the dramatization of Chekhov’s only detective work – the story “Drama on the Hunt” – Chernyshev got the role of the forensic investigator Ivan Kamyshev, and Shatalova – the young frivolous daughter of the forester Olga.

According to the laws of the genre, the murder of young Olga is investigated by Kamyshev, who is middle-aged by the standards of the 19th century and in love with her (during the main events, the hero of 51-year-old Andrei Chernyshev was 30–35 years old, but in the epilogue he is much older, plus ideas about age have undergone changes over two centuries) .

It’s worth mentioning right away that it’s best to watch the play without knowing the text of the original source and the 1978 Soviet film “My Affectionate and Tender Beast.” Then the intrigue will remain until the last: with a total duration of two hours and 45 minutes, the action keeps you in suspense for a good two hours or so.

How to make a literary text multi-layered and multi-level is approximately clear; How to transfer all this into the theatrical space – each director decides in his own way; production designer Andrei Sharov divided the stage into three parts horizontally. The first shot is the office of an elderly editor (Valery Afanasyev), to whom a former investigator brings his own notes about a real incident. We see the office in the prologue and epilogue – when at the beginning the manuscript is brought by a strange visitor with a cockade, sent to the basket, then taken out of there and read, which opens the second and third plans – most often this is the house of the count (Alexander Vershinin) and the garden located behind the mansion, passing into the forest.

And finally, when the editor, having delved into the essence of what he read, reveals a crime for which an innocent man has long been convicted – Olga’s husband, the manager of the count’s estate, Pyotr Urbenin (Alexander Klyukvin).

It is important to note that the wall between the editorial office and the house is conditional and impenetrable, it serves as the boundary of space and time, but it is quite possible to get into the house from the garden – the doors and windows there are real, Olga’s crazy forester father even breaks the glass in these windows. And lightning flashes behind them, setting up the most dramatic moments. The thunderstorm, by the way, killed Olga’s mother, which caused the girl’s irrepressible thirst for life, and a thirst for a beautiful life: if she is ready to die, then in an expensive dress – which, in fact, is what happens.

The performance is successful on a macro level, when what is happening seems as alive as life itself, when the weather elements are conveyed so reliably that you feel the air saturated with ozone.

The micro level is also beautiful—the details and development of individual characters. How to show the humiliating submission of servants? A tray with glasses of vodka is placed on one’s head, so that the count and his friend loudly knock the glasses on the metal. And the second gets drunk on cognac and rushes into the forest so that the killer wipes his bloody hands on his clothes – which forces the servant to wash the bloody stains in the lake and beg for mercy during interrogation, because it is more likely that a slave will be sent to hard labor, not a master.

More examples of little things: “You are an empty person,” says one of the actors, and puts his hand on the anatomical skeleton. Or a servant appears in the room with a long thing for extinguishing candles in a chandelier and “puts them out” one at a time – and the lighting operator turns off the light bulbs one by one.

The only problem is that some of these moves are directorial, and some are Chekhovian. But the rickety marble column in the count’s garden is definitely a find by the creators of the play. Anton Pavlovich has it made of wood; in the story there is no hint of the cargo-cult copying by the Russian nobility of antiquity and, in general, of everything foreign, ridiculed, say, in the film “Formula of Love.”

From the very beginning, the column acts as an omen of something terrible. Physically, one person dies in the story and play – the heroine of Varvara Shatalova, who decided to escape from the wilderness of the forest, giving herself to the manager, the count – or anyone, just to overcome poverty and “low” origin. But isn’t everyone else dead in the work and beyond? Is it a coincidence that the remark “there is only abomination all around” thrown into the hall?

Using quotes from the classics (such as: “the pleasures that debauchery gives do not give even a hundredth part of what a quiet, family life would give you”), Andrei Zhitinkin “promotes traditional values” – after all, the Year of the Family is on the calendar. But he does this unnoticed by the audience, not didactically, not “over the top.” The ironic and parodying liberal messages phrase “This is the situation of women in Russia” (this is about Olga throwing herself into the arms of one or the other) is greeted by the audience with laughter and applause.