Buy tickets for the play "Who Lives Well in Rus'." Reviews about "who lives well in Rus'" Who lives well in Rus' performance Gogol

It’s good at the Gogol Center for the audience, intelligent people and simply sympathizers. Any citizen who cares about culture can visit this live theater space. A ticket to the performance is only needed to enter the theater hall, which is always full. In the center, created by the talented Kirill Serebrennikov, you can:

Enjoy sitting in a cafe, listening with interest to lectures (before each performance they talk about the era, the playwright, creating the necessary mood),

Wander around with curiosity and take photos between the installations,

With curiosity, gain access to the theater media library (you only need a passport).

Also, in the center there is “Gogol Cinema” with stories and screenings of selected premieres and “Gogol +” - where you can talk “live” with actors, playwrights and directors.

In general, there is no need to lure the public here, the Gogol Center has a special audience, something akin to the one that in the stagnant seventies was faithful to the Taganka Theater not only for its undeniable talent, but also for its revolutionary nature, dissimilarity, and obstinacy.

The play "WHO LIVES WELL IN Rus'" is an epic in terms of the power of concept, text, spirit and execution. It runs for four hours with two intermissions.

Three parts, three acts - “Argument”, “Drunken Night”, “Feast for the Whole World” - so different, as if you were shown three performances in an evening instead of one. You just need to tune in to the perception of a complex multidimensional action. And it’s clear why Kirill Serebrennikov was invited by famous opera houses. The second part, “Drunken Night,” is a pure opera, made in a modern, masterful, exciting, complex manner. I would like to note the highest level of vocals of the actresses of the Gogol Center - Rita Kron, Maria Selezneva, Irina Bragina, Ekaterina Steblina and others.

The full-flowing multi-dimensional story fascinates, captivates, time flies almost unnoticed. True, several people left the theater during the first intermission, but this did not affect the quality and quantity of the audience.

I do not consider myself a fan of Kirill Serebrennikov’s work, although I worry with all my heart about his future fate - both as a person and as a free creator. But in this performance, which has been on stage at the Gogol Center for the third year now and has been an extraordinary cultural event, I accepted everything. I was delighted by the work of the theater’s close-knit, friendly professional team. Plastic design (Anton Adasinsky), vocals and musical design (composers Ilya Demutsky and Denis Khorov), expressive costumes (Polina Grechko, Kirill Serebrennikov). But the main thing, of course, is the director's idea. We all once walked through Nekrasov's school without any pleasure, in passing, believing that this poem was about distant and alien times, not about us. But the times have come when it affected everyone and will still affect everyone. The question of “who lives happily and freely in Rus'” today is followed by such disappointing answers that even optimists’ eyes glaze over.

Nekrasov's text, translated by Kirill Serebrennikov today, causes shock. The iconic pipeline laid by the director-set designer across the entire stage-country reaches the entire poor population (women in cotton robes and men in alcoholic T-shirts). All the strength, means and years go to this pipe. The remaining time is filled with old TVs and vodka and massacre. In the depths behind the pipe you can see a wall with barbed wire running over the top... where to go? - the artist reflects prophetically. And seven men gather on the road, tormented by questions that they cannot express, deciding to ask the people: “Who lives happily and at ease in Rus'?”

How they walk across their native land, how they toil - you have to see, along the way, not forgetting to read and re-read the inscriptions on numerous T-shirts, and listen with your heart, and think... think...

And how a folk singer in the style of Zykina-Voronets, the beautiful Rita Kron, distracts from questions and delights the ear.

The multicolored performance is like Russia, sometimes scary, rough, unsightly, but beautiful, kind, immense...

There are many surprises in the production. For example, in the third part of the play, Nekrasov’s “men”, wandering around the hall, encourage tired spectators with a shot glass, serving vodka from a bucket to those who answer the question why he is happy. Primitive answers like: “I’m happy because I really like the performance...” are not encouraged in any way.

The central figure of the finale is the monologue of the “happy” woman. Matryona (Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) talks about her Russian female lot in such a way that the entire male population is devastated. Humility in response to humiliation is the only thing that has held Rus' together for centuries, wandering through uprisings and revolutions, stagnation and perestroika, feudalism, socialism, capitalism...

What awaits you, what do you want, Rus'?

Doesn't give an answer...

Photo by Ira Polyarnaya

Gogol Center, play “Who Lives Well in Rus'”, director Kirill Serebrennikov

Once upon a time, Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov wrote a poem “To whom in Rus'...” - well, he almost wrote it, didn’t finish it - in which he invented the Russian people. Desperate, stubborn (“man is a bull”), cocky, a lover of vodka and terrible stories about repentant sinners - but most importantly, many-sided. The poem has absorbed dozens of different destinies. The poet drew the rhythms, vocabulary, and images from folklore, but he thought up a lot and sang it himself.

Kirill Serebrennikov tried to do without fiction and without stylization - and showed a people not like Nekrasov, but today. The one whose spirit he and the troupe, preparing for the performance, searched for last summer in the Yaroslavl region, traveling through towns, dilapidated villages, going into current houses, talking with people, local historians, priests - filming of this journey can be seen during intermission in the foyer "Gogol Center". And he showed who Nekrasov’s Roman-Demyan-Luka-the Gubin brothers-old man Pakhom-i-Prov turned into in the 21st century.

Into a migrant worker in sweatpants, into a riot policeman in camouflage, into a stupid revolutionary with a perpetually broken nose, into a hard worker with string bags, into a drunkard who can barely spit out a word. And everything seems to look the same. Universal grease instead of Nekrasov’s diversity. Lumpens, semi-criminals, aggressive and lost, not needed by anyone. Neither the fat-bellied merchant, nor the landowner, nor the tsar. Although sometimes they even try to drag them all onto TV - the argument scene that opens the play is wittily presented as a talk show with the host (Ilya Romashko), who is trying to find out from the participants who lives a fun, free life in Rus'. But real boys are laconic.

Treat

They also tried to involve the audience in the action - in the third part, Nekrasov’s “men” went around the hall with a bucket of real vodka, offering to talk about their happiness and knock over a shot glass. There were people willing, but not many. As a result, the pure Moscow public did not really hit the notes of the poem about peasant happiness.

The “boyish” style is also supported by the design of the performance, which takes place against the uncomfortable backdrop of the outskirts: a metal pipe stretches sadly through a vacant lot, there are some plant thorns on a brick wall, the vacant lot ends in blackness. Here the eternal cold night stretches on, in the center of which there is a bucket of vodka. The second part, “Drunk Night”, a pantomime, picks up and makes the vodka motif the main one: it is a dead drunken, staged “squirrel” with convulsions of half-naked male bodies in the twilight, merging either into a creepy multi-legged caterpillar, or into struggling barge haulers. In the finale, lifeless corpses dot the same dark black wasteland (Anton Adasinsky was invited to choreograph the performance).

The appearance of the “peasant woman” Matryona Timofeevna (performed by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) in the third part, dressed, of course, as a collective farmer - padded jacket, scarf, boots - pushes aside this thick male darkness. Dobrovolskaya lives her completely unbearable “female lot”, the death of a child, the beatings of her husband, the shouts of her mother-in-law with a smile, incredibly humanely and charmingly, drowning her grief not in wine - in work and love “for the children.” Her appearance adds an unexpectedly lively, warm tone to the pamphlet unfolding on stage. But soon everything again drowns in rap, in Yegor Letov’s hopeless “Motherland”, the approaching darkness again and empty mottos on T-shirts, which, as usual, the characters change and change in the last scene. Everything flashes on the T-shirts, from Winnie the Pooh to a portrait of Vysotsky, from “Stalin is our helmsman” to “USSR” and “I am Russian” - all that remains of us today.

This vinaigrette replaced what inspired Nekrasov 150 years ago, what inspired him with hope - a holistic folk culture, deep, multi-colored, powerful. Now, instead of life calculated according to the calendar, with baptisms, weddings, funerals, prohibitions, joys, fairy tales, salty jokes, now we have this: T-shirts with vulgar pictures, a checkered shuttle bag, a computer monitor with the screensaver “It’s glorious to live for the people in Holy Rus'.” Instead of songs that were sung by the whole village, there was a beauty with a braid, betraying verbal incoherence about the Blues and Russia, the embodiment of falsehood (it was not without reason that her appearance caused bitter laughter in the hall). Instead of Grisha Dobrosklonov, the “people's defender”, whom Nekrasov was the only one to make happy in the poem, there is a pathetic bespectacled man, a white-ribbon boy, helpless, powerless.

One thing has not changed since Nekrasov’s time: voluntary slavery and vodka. The heroes of the play “The Last One” played in the first part of the play played along with the crazy old landowner who did not want to recognize the abolition of serfdom, and pretended that slavery continued. A seemingly innocent idea turned into the death of the peasant Agap - he tried to rebel, but, drunk, still agreed to lie down under the rods for the sake of lordly fun. And although they didn’t even touch him with a finger, he died immediately after a mock flogging. I wonder why? This is not the only question we are asked to answer. Every scene bristles with topicality and ruthless questions about today.

The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” staged by Kirill Serebrennikov, is an artistic but journalistic statement about our universal collapse.

The idea of ​​composing a joint performance with the Yaroslavl Theater named after. Fedora Volkova did not arise by chance from Kirill Serebrennikov. Yaroslavl land is the birthplace of Nekrasov. And his endless poem-cry, poem-laughter, poem-verbatim “Who lives well in Rus'?” seemed to fall into the very heart of current Russian problems. Accompanied by enthusiasts and “stalkers,” they walked through abandoned villages and amazing nature, past stunning museums and a decayed, long-gone life.

We started, of course, with Karabikha, Nekrasov’s homeland, and then moved deeper into the province. “Small towns - Rybinsk, Poshekhonye, ​​Myshkin, once rich villages - Prechistoye, Porechye, Kukoboi - still somehow barely survive, but around them there is space overgrown with forest, weeds, hogweed, where there is almost nothing else,” - Serebrennikov said.

Many might have thought that the performance would move towards verbatim, documentary, dangerous conversations with those who now live there and are looking for an answer to the question of Nekrasov’s men. Is it for this reason that the Yaroslavl Theater dropped out as a partner, and the Gogol Center eventually produced the play on its own, releasing the premiere at the peak of the most alarming conversations about its future. But it turned out that Serebrennikov and his wonderful actors did not need any other text. Nekrasov’s poem was more than enough for three hours of stage fantasies and adventures of the most outlandish nature, and from the expedition to Karabikha the actors also brought material from Afanasyev’s “Forbidden Tales,” initially planning to combine them with the poem. But these fairy tales became the basis for another performance, which will become part of a duology about the “Russian world”.

To reconnect with the text, which since school days seemed like a boring part of the compulsory “program”, to return to the theater the opportunity again - through all Soviet and post-Soviet censorship, whatever it may be - to speak out, to act out a fantastic, "pochvennichesky", Nekrasov paradise - this is no small task . It turned out that it was Serebrennikov, who always and only thought about Russia, who had already heard it through Prilepin’s “thugs” and the infernal mechanics of “Dead Souls”, through Ostrovsky’s “forest” characters and Gorky’s “philistines”, through the devilish bureaucracy of erasing man in Tynianov’s “Kizha” “- only he managed to take up this outlandish “tug” and open up new poetic worlds on the stage. Plowed up by the theater, this amazing text began to sound with the furious, frightening, hopeless and life-giving voices of real, uncomposed life. Following not the letter, but the spirit of Nekrasov’s poem, which is very different in its poetic and meaningful structure, he divided the performance into three completely different - including genre - parts.

In the first - "Dispute" - seven young actors from the Gogol Center meet Nekrasov's men and try on them from the 21st century. The narrator - a kind of Moscow smart guy, a resident of the Garden Ring - with amazement, repeating what accompanied the guys on their Yaroslavl expedition, discovers their unknown... and familiar world. Here is a bespectacled dissident from all the Russian marsh squares, here is a street robber, here is a martyr of slavery, here is a warrior. We recognize them in their padded jackets and T-shirts, in their jeans and rags, in their camouflage of prisoners and guards, always ready to go to “bloody battle.” They talk about the tsar in a whisper, about the priest with just their lips, about the sovereign’s minister - with fear... There is nothing to actualize here - Nekrasov’s world endlessly reproduces itself in Holy Rus', repeating all the same words about the tsar, and about the priest, and endlessly harnessing into a new yoke, a new strap of barge haulers.

Several stories keep this narrative on a tense nerve, and among them the strongest are “about the exemplary slave, the faithful Yakov,” who loved his slavery more than anything in the world, until he was inflamed with hatred and hanged himself in revenge; and - the main thing - the last thing, about those who, for the sake of the sick master, continued to play out serfdom, as if it had not ended in 1864. It is this very state of the “Russian world” on the border between slavery and freedom, life and death, humiliation and rebellion, sin and holiness - following Nekrasov - that the Gogol Center explores.

Calling to the aid of Anton Adasinsky with his expressive, passionate choreography, two composers - Ilya Demutsky (author of the ballet "Hero of Our Time") and Denis Khorov, dressing the actresses in incredible "Russian" couture sundresses, arming them with saxophones and electric guitars, folk -jazz compositions and folk choirs, the energy of pagan Russian melodies and rock and roll, Serebrennikov turned Nekrasov’s poem into a real bomb. When in the second - choreographic - act "Drunken Night" the huge stage of the Gogol Center, open to the brick wall, is "sown" with the bodies of men, and witchcraft girl voices howl their almost erotic mortal songs over this dead (drunk) field, it will seem that he has appeared in modern theater there is that same tragic spirit that has not existed for a long time.

In the third part, one soul emerged from the choral beginning - a woman's - to transform the folk tragedy into a song of fate. By pouring vodka for the "men" Evgenia Dobrovolskaya - Matryona Timofeevna - returns to the Russian theater the intonation of the great tragic actresses of the past. At first it even seems that this cannot be, that her soul-tearing confession is only playing at tragedy - completely postmodern. But after a few minutes there is no strength to resist the pain to which she surrenders entirely, and the strength of spirit rising above her. Of course, this long confession will be replaced by a choral, rock and roll finale, he will build his difficult relationship with Nekrasov’s “Rus”, he will sing - without embarrassment, backhand and seriously - his words about “the mighty and the powerless,” and it will seem like an army , which rises, is similar to the faithful Jacob, killing himself in his unknown strength and weakness.

Anatomy of Patriotism

The stage is blocked across by a giant concrete wall with barbed wire on top. An absolute fact. And no matter what happens on the visible side - whether a fight, a holiday, an alcoholic bacchanalia - no one will ever even think about approaching this wall. Although, apparently, behind it live those “who live happily and freely in Rus'.”

The play, of course, is about those who are not so happy. Here they are, “seven temporary workers from adjacent villages,” gather and cautiously sit in a circle on school chairs; a respectable presenter with a microphone will give everyone the floor. Here is the lost little man, clearly snatched halfway to Petushki (Fominov); and the neat intellectual with the manners of Leonid Parfenov (Steinberg); and a squat Adidas fan who never parts with his purse (Kukushkin); and a stooped hipster in glasses and a robe just from the barbershop (Avdeev) - his nose will be the first to get bloody when, as an answer to a sacramental question, he hastily unfolds a crumpled sheet with large forbidden letters: TO THE TSAR. However, even such striking heterogeneity will not prevent all of them, after trying on “Armenian peasant jackets”, to merge in a single patriotic ecstasy within half an hour.

In three energetic acts, accompanied by a jazz band (bass, guitar, drums, keys, trumpet), Kirill Serebrennikov fit about a third of Nekrasov’s immense work. Outside the staging brackets, the director left rich landscapes, and all sorts of details of peasant life, and games of forgotten dialects, in a word, everything that makes the poem the glory of a great historical document. In addition, on their journey, the characters of the play pass, for example, a rather significant character named Pop. This is understandable: Nekrasov’s clergyman, who was under the careful tutelage of the censors, is presented in too infallible a manner. Thus, seven travelers who intended to sequentially talk with each of those suspected of a good life (landowner, official, priest, merchant, boyar, minister, tsar) lost an important respondent, while Nekrasov did not have time to finish meeting with the most important people (about what is scary before death, they say, I regretted it). So there was no need to rely on plot twists and turns.

Bypassing literary overtones and aesthetic anachronisms, Serebrennikov dives into the essence of Nekrasov’s narrative and finds there - surprise - a group portrait of us. Serfdom was abolished a long time ago, and the people are still messing around, unable to manage what seems to be a long-awaited freedom. So, for example, when in Nekrasov the peasants make fun of the senile master, pretending to serve, as if the old order had returned, in Serebrennikov the heroes laughingly put on astrakhan fur coats and beaver hats that have been collecting dust since the time of Brezhnev's stagnation.

However, the focus with historical rhyme takes place only in the first and third acts - “Dispute” and “Feast for the Whole World”, solved as a chaotic stand-up with songs and disguises. Given the responsibility of director-choreographer Anton Adasinsky (creator of the cult plastic theater Derevo), the central act, “Drunken Night”, is a bodily frenzy devoid of not only words and (practically) clothing, but also of any historical signs, accompanied by stumbling music in in the spirit of either “Hummingbird” or “Polite Refusal” (composer - Ilya Demutsky). Huddled together, sweaty little men and peasant women subtly transform from Bruegel's peasants into Repin's barge haulers, then indulge in an unbridled cancan, then one by one they fall down like they've been knocked down. This sudden energy bomb, on the one hand, almost literally illustrates the mesmerizing evidence of Nekrasov (“The people walk and fall, / As if because of the rollers / The enemies are shooting at the men with grapeshot!”), and on the other hand, it serves as a contrasting shower of physical expressiveness between two generally pop acts. And if in the “Argument” and “Feast” collected from the actor’s sketches, the tone is set by the objective life of the Soviet era with enamel mugs, buckets, Belomor and sheepskin coats, then about the naked “Drunken Night”, I think even the most Western Ukrainian will be able to confirm the presence of that what is commonly called the Russian spirit - beyond specific geography and time boundaries.

The painful paradoxism of the Russian soul, which is ready to “sin shamelessly, heartily” in order to “walk sideways into God’s temple” in the morning, is the frontal theme in Serebrennikov’s work, and Nekrasov in his track record took a place next to Saltykov-Shchedrin, Gorky, Ostrovsky and Gogol. In the new performance, as if summing up the accumulated experience, heroes from old Moscow Art Theater masterpieces meet with representatives of the latest premieres of the artistic director of the Gogol Center. Phenomenal organic actress, Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, who played the most lively roles in the deathly stuffy “Petty Bourgeois” and “The Golovlev Gentlemen” at the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov, here for the first time the director brought to the forefront for the solo embodiment of the most terrible episode of the poem (“The Peasant Woman”) in the best traditions of psychological realism. In those places where the performance especially acutely resembles a daring popular show in the spirit of Nikolai Kolyada, the functions of the toastmaster were shared by the insinuating gentleman Semyon Steinberg, who plays Chichikov in Dead Souls, and the handsome owner of a bright oriental appearance, Evgeny Sangadzhiev. In total, about twenty people are occupied, and the background here is not complete without revelations. Just look at the vocal performance of miniature Maria Poezzhaeva in a black kokoshnik - her melodious and muttering ritual persistently, to the point of goosebumps, reminds us of the pagan cosmos hidden in ancient Russian songs, about which we are unlikely to ever learn anything.

It is from such fragments, which hardly stick together into a single whole, but are valuable in their paranormal beauty, that the essence of the performance is formed. Supporting mise-en-scenes such as freeze-frames with frantic waving of the tricolor and heroic posing in souvenir T-shirts with portraits of Putin and the inscription “I am Russian” are intended to give some kind of harmony to the director’s motley, like a patchwork quilt. Thanks to them, the puzzle comes together into a convincing and well-known story about what the population, driven crazy by the freedom that has befallen them, has come to in search of their own self.