BATTLE OF LIFE
CHARACTER DICKENS' STORY
PART ONE
Once upon a time, in good England - it doesn't matter when and where exactly - a stubborn battle was fought. It happened in summer, when the waves of grass were green; and the battle lasted all day. More than one wild flower, a fragrant goblet, created by the hand of the Almighty for dew, clung to the ground that day, horrified that the enamel of its cup was filled with blood flush with the edges. More than one insect, owing its delicate color to its innocent leaves and grass, was repainted that day by dying people and, running away in fright, marked its trail with an unnatural stripe. A motley butterfly, flying through the air, stained its wings with blood. The river turned red; the trampled field turned into a swamp, and pools of blood in the footprints and hooves of the alley, sparkling in the sun, all over the expanse of the plain.
Spare us the sky to see someday the scene that the moon saw on the battlefield, when, emerging from behind the black line of the distant horizon, bordered by tree branches, he rose into the sky and looked at the plain, dotted with faces turned upwards - faces that once sometimes they searched for their mother’s gaze at their mother’s breasts or dozed in happy oblivion. Deliver us, God, to learn all the secrets whispered to the infected wind that flew over the battle scene by day, and death and suffering by night! Many times the lonely moon shone over this field and many times its sad guards - stars illuminated it, and many times the wind swept over it from all countries of the world, until the traces of the battle were erased.
These traces lingered for a long time, but showed up only in trifles: nature is above the evil human passions: - she soon cheered up and smiled again over the criminal battlefield, as she smiled before, when it was still innocent. The larks still sang above him in the air; the shadows of the clouds, chasing each other, flashed across the grass and cornfields, over vegetable gardens and forests, over the roofs and spitz of the church of a young town under a thicket of trees, - and ran away to the distant boundary between heaven and earth, where evening dawn. The fields were sown with bread, and harvested from it; the once scarlet river moved the wheels of the mill; the peasants, whistling, plowed the land; here and there groups of reapers and mowers were seen peacefully going about their business; sheep and bulls grazed; children screamed and rustled through the pastures, driving away the birds; smoke rose in the chimneys of the huts; the Sunday bell sounded peacefully; old men and women lived and died; timid creatures of the field and simple flowers in bushes and gardens bloomed and withered at the appointed time: and all this on a terrible, bloody battlefield, where thousands fell dead in the hot battle.
At first, thick green areas appeared in patches among the rising bread, and the people looked at them with horror. Year after year these spots showed up again; everyone knew that under these fat places buried people and horses lay in heaps and fertilized the soil. The peasants, plowing these places, with disgust avoided many large worms; sheaves bound here were long called sheaves of battle and were set aside separately; no one remembers that such a sheaf should ever be in the general harvest. For a long time the plow, cutting through a fresh furrow, threw out the remnants of military things. For a long time there were wounded trees on the battlefield, fragments of chopped and destroyed fences and trenches, where they fought to the death, trampled places where neither grass nor blade of grass sprouted. For a long time not a single village beauty wanted to adorn her head or chest with the most beautiful flower from this field of death; Many years have passed, but there was still a belief among the people that the berries growing here leave an almost indelible stain on the hand that plucked them.
But the years quickly and imperceptibly, like summer clouds flying over the field, little by little erased even these traces of the ancient battle; they took with them the legends that lived in the memory of the surrounding inhabitants; tales of the battle passed, at last, weakening from year to year, into the tales of old women, vaguely repeated by the winter light.
Where flowers and berries, inviolable on their stems, grew for so long, gardens appeared, houses were erected, and children played battle on the lawn. The wounded trees had long ago been cut down for firewood for Christmas, and, crackling, became prey to the flames. The dense greenness of the fat patches among the rye became no fresher than the memory of those whose ashes rested under it. The plow still threw out rusty pieces of metal from time to time, but it was already difficult to decide what their use was, and those who found them marveled at them and argued. The old chopped cuirass and helmet hung in the church for so long that the decrepit, half-blind old man, who now tried in vain to see them over the whitewashed arch, marveled at them, being still a child. If those who fell on the battlefield could rise for a minute in the same form as they fell, and each in the same place where he was caught premature death, wounded, pale as shadows, hundreds of warriors would look at the doors and windows of dwellings, surround a peaceful hearth, replace the stocks of bread in the granaries and granaries, stand between a baby and his nurse, swim across the river, spin around near the mill, they would cover both the garden and the arc, they would lie in stacks of half-dead bodies on the hayfield. Thus changed the battlefield, where thousands upon thousands fell in a heated battle.
It may not have been so many - a lot of it - a hundred times ago - as in the small garden of one of the dousy of a stone house with a porch, settled in capriches: so, in a fan -shaped morning morning, there were smell and music, and the dwarfs dancing cheerfully. on the grass; half a dozen peasant women, standing on the stairs picking apples from trees, stopped their work and looked at the dance, sharing the fun of the girls. The scene was charming, lively, genuinely cheerful: a beautiful day, a solitary place; the girls danced in complete nonchalance without the slightest compulsion, truly with all their hearts.
If the world did not care about the effect, I think (this is my personal opinion, and I hope that you will agree with me), - I think that you would live better, and it would be more pleasant for others to live with you. It was impossible to look without delight at the dance of these girls. The only spectators were peasant women picking apples on the stairs. The girls were very pleased that they were in charge of the dance, but they danced for their own pleasure (or, at least, you would certainly think so); and you would admire them as involuntarily as they involuntarily danced. How they danced!
Not like opera dancers. No, not at all. And not like the first pupils of some Madame N. N. No. It was neither a square dance, nor a minuet, nor a contradanse, but something special: neither in the old, nor in the new style, nor in English, nor in French; perhaps something like a Spanish dance, as they say, cheerful, free and similar to improvisation to the sounds of castanets. They whirled like a light cloud, flew from end to end along the alley, and their airy movements seemed to spread, over the brightly lit stage, farther and farther, as if steep on the water. Waves of their hair and a cloud of dress, plastic grass under their feet, branches rustling in the morning air, sparkling leaves and their motley shadow on soft greenery, a balsamic wind merrily turning a distant mill, all around these girls, even a peasant with his plow and horses, blackening far on the horizon, as if they were the last things in the world - everything seemed to be dancing with the girls.
Finally, the youngest of the sisters, out of breath, with a merry laugh, rushed to rest on the bench. The eldest leaned against a tree beside her. The orchestra, the wandering violin and harp, finished with a loud finale, as proof of the freshness of their forces; but, in fact, the musicians took such a tempo and, arguing at speed with the dancers, reached such a presto that they could not have endured even half a minute longer. The peasant women, under the apple trees, expressed their approval in a vague way, and at once set to work again, like bees.
Their activities were redoubled, perhaps, by the appearance of an elderly gentleman: it was Dr. Jeddler himself, owner of the house and garden, and the father of the dancing girls. He ran out to see what was going on here and what the hell was going on in his garden before breakfast. Dr. Jeddler, you must know, was a great philosopher and did not like music very much.
Music and dance - today! muttered the doctor, stopping in perplexity. - I thought that today was a terrible day for them. However, the world is full of contradictions. Grace! Mary! he continued loudly: "What is this?" Or has the world gone mad even more this morning?
Be indulgent to him, papa, if he has gone crazy, answered his youngest daughter, Mary, coming up to him and fixing her eyes on him: - today is someone's birth.
Walter Klemmer reviews: 96 ratings: 208 rating: 455
In a nutshell, the Zhenovachi lost this battle.
The absolutely linear story of Charles Dickens "The Battle of Life" (1846), the ending of which Wikipedia calls "too happy even for Dickens", Zhenovach decided to rewrite it as a frivolous play, which the heroes of the "Battle" themselves clumsily play. A dozen typical inhabitants of Victorian England - Doctor Jedler (Sergey Kachanov, the only overgrown actor in "Zhenovachi", memorable for the colorful "Marienbad" role of father Maryamchik), his two daughters (actresses Kurdenevich and Polovtseva, unfamiliar to me), the fiance of one of them (Maxim Lyutikov), Clemency's maid (Golden Mask laureate Masha Shashlova, and here she is the only more or less living character), two lawyers (Abroskin and Svitelnitel) and their wives, a certain Writer (usually excellent Sergey Pirnyak; yesterday I wanted to because of him cry) plus three silent musicians and a dozen green apples. The stage - the English living room is slightly abandoned, decorated to a minimum, but bewitchingly comfortable, at a certain moment the scenery begins to dramatically quietly disperse deep into the stage (even the mirror floats away from the gilded frame in one of the most beautiful scenes featuring Shashlova); the light, as always with Zhenovachi, is ideal and a separate character in itself.
Live people on the stage did not look so attractive. For the first fifteen minutes, I was frightened as I watched the “reading room” unfold on the stage of the best theater troupe in Moscow: all the characters of the “Battle”, sitting down in their places, without warning, without any expression in their voice and with the rarest glimpses of themselves, read themselves replicas of "themselves" from the galleys, obviously just written by the Writer. Then, when I realized what was happening, I began to wait for them (the heroes) to leave this "pampering" and finally the real story of life would play out - but unfortunately, almost three hours of stage time with one intermission (during which the dumbfounded spectators silently crowded in the foyer of the theater, exchanging perplexed glances), which stretched out like all nine, nothing has changed. The expressionless reading by the characters of their "written roles" did not end - only occasionally the characters, as if awakening from a scenario hibernation, show live emotion, which of course immediately found a response in the public. The rest of the time, the hall, packed to capacity, sat in a complete stupor.
I can understand what Zhenovach wanted with such an experiment. Probably, against the backdrop of the amateurish drawing of the "life story", the characters of this very story should have shown even more clearly how unfeigned and all-conquering life is, and that sincerity will appear where it seems it can no longer be ... Very much in the spirit of the Studio with its regular appeals to universal human constants. But - Mr. Zhenovach, what were you thinking about?? It remains a mystery to me. It turned out to be a physically unbearable, monotonous spectacle, not to mention the fact that there is no smell of the notorious "new sincerity" there. And of course, watching the most talented young actors in the country suffer right on stage from the director’s failed idea is sadism. the highest degree. Seryozha Pirnyak suffers most of all with the text, who got the most unemotional narrative of the Writer, but even Abroskin and Grisha Slubitel, who are accustomed to profitable comedy characters, are in complete disconnection with each other and with the public. What can we say about the rest.
What is most disappointing in this whole story is that I am a complete admirer of the “gentlemen”, I went to their diplomas at GITIS, played out in dusty auditoriums for 50 people, I watched their “Marienbad” seven times, “The Seedy Family” four, and I will go again, because that the Studio is able to make it so that even in the most ossified classics on the stage you begin to see completely living history, in which you plunge headlong, and therefore fall in love with these amazing beautiful guys and return to them again and again. I can’t doom myself to such torments as re-watching their new performance.
Ulrich reviews: 275 ratings: 348 rating: 412
Sergei Zhenovach continues and... wins again...
The seeming simplicity (and even more so - primitiveness) of the "Battle of Life" is an excellent trick of S. Zhenovach, who is actually more cunning and more complicated than it seems at first glance. “The Battle of Life” - baffled and disappointed a large part of the already seemingly faithful and tamed public. Many are dissatisfied and... that's great! He outplayed everyone again. This is not gloating, it means that he is ahead, and we will have a theatrical future ...
The battle of Zhenovach is the epicenter cultural process- fighting for the opportunity to keep their voice. S. Zhenovach - defends the right to speak about things that are impossible in the form of a direct statement, and there is a need for articulation and living such common truths as good, evil, forgiveness, brotherhood. Many have confused artistic expression and MEANING, refuse the second due to the impossibility of the first.
S.Zhenovach, first of all, is a fearless fighter for the right to discuss the most important values of human nature and to preach. Secondly, he seeks and finds artistic means for the sermon to take place!!! He does it subtly and slyly. Those who don't understand...
...let him come another time...
PS. Looking at the new fantastic STI theater in a gold-weaving (!) factory and the successes of Zhenovach's guys, you understand that Dickens, with his caramelism, ceases to seem like a utopia...
NastyaPhoenix reviews: 381 ratings: 381 rating: 402
Actors enter the stage, eating apples with appetite. They rehearse the play, flipping through the pages of the text with pencils in their fingers and hesitantly reading out their roles that have not yet been learned. They stumble, get confused, sometimes late, introducing funny notes into a serious classical text ... And it seems that the idea is not new - I saw something similar with Fomenko in War and Peace, but the atmosphere of a close-knit team, characteristic of all the performances of Zhenovach's pupils, is especially acute here felt and especially captivating with its charm. So much so that I want to immediately join them, sit comfortably in an old Victorian armchair in front of a real fireplace, in which real fire dances on logs and on which real lighted candles smoke a mirror and a white wall, crunch an apple, recite pathos monologues. After all, it seems so simple that anyone could ... but here is the second act, to which our actors approached already clearly more prepared. They no longer read from a piece of paper, and you immediately forget about these pieces of paper, starting to see not the performers of the roles, but their characters - unexpectedly alive, unusually alive, because we so often look at the heroes of Dickens' fairy tales as symbols, masks, personified human qualities. Those who had the least diligence in reading the text in the first act act in the second act most emotionally, sincerely and naturally - and such a brilliant transformation, in turn, turns a static action, like other STI productions that could easily pass for radio performances, into a fascinating spectacle. The viewer seems to open the doors to theater kitchen, allow you to touch the process of directing and acting, and this little miracle catches more than the plot of a Dickensian parable, almost biblical, with the corresponding morality about philanthropy and virtue. Double happy ending: in a house built on a battlefield, family, union are happily reunited strong in spirit, sacrificial devoted friend friend of people; on the theatrical stage, the union of talented individuals who understood and felt these people, who experienced their difficult fate. Only in this way - without sentimentality and didactics, without forgetting about the line between the "current century" and the "past century" - it is both possible and necessary to present the brontosaurs of world literature to the viewer. Then you leave the performance with aesthetic pleasure from the lightness of stage life and lyrical live music, with the warmest and most positive emotions, with a calm confidence that not everything in this world is as bad as it might seem at first glance.
24.12.09
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Nikolai Shuvaev reviews: 49 ratings: 49 rating: 9
Notes of an amateur.
18. Studio theatrical art. Battle of Life (C. Dickens). Dir. Sergey Zhenovach.
Nonserious sermon.
As you know, in the Studio of theatrical art, before each performance, the audience is greeted with surprises (Moscow-Petushki were accompanied by exhibited vodka and snacks). This time, plain fresh green apples in vases lay on a long wooden table in the sideboard. In the group black-white-green photograph of the troupe, hung out in the hall, exactly the same ones turned green. The actors also gnawed at them together at the very beginning of the performance, which set them in a certain way.
On a narrow strip of the stage, right in front of the audience, a simple English interior is recreated: a burning fireplace with a clock and candles, an armchair, a table, a chest, veneer on the walls. Part of the props was brought from England, where the troupe traveled for "immersion": the actors wandered the streets, looked into the writer's house-museum and his favorite pub. “The Battle of Life” is one of the “Christmas stories” of moralizing content that the writer released at the end of December, by Christmas for several years.
A story about love triangle invented by Dickens, consisting of two sisters who love each other, the elder Grace and the younger Marion, and the latter's fiancé Elfred, is full of emotions and passions. Younger sister suddenly disappears for everyone right before the wedding. Later it turns out that this was done out of love for the eldest, who was secretly in love with the same Alfred. This is a story of self-sacrifice for the happiness of another, close and dear person. Best years the flourishing of beauty and youth were sacrificed voluntarily. But the love story here is just an excuse to once again deliver a moral sermon. The ingenuous but wise biblical “Forgive insults, remember no evil” and “Do to others as you want them to do to you” are repeated in different guises many times, so that they are remembered for sure. To those who sacredly observe these rules, the author generously bestows happiness and prosperity. But it does not come easy, everyone should have their own hard victory in the "invisible battle of life", received at a considerable cost.
The text contains a lot of descriptions, reasoning from the author, and a "Writer" is introduced into the composition of the performers, who reads large chunks of the text. For most of the story, the actors read about themselves in the third person and “from sight”, loudly rustling the pages and deliberately turning them over simultaneously. What happens at times is more like a rehearsal or a skit, where the characters memorize their text on the go, but do it fun and easy, making faces. Actors do not always have time to find their text and giggle: - Seryozha, what page? Or they even repeat failed takes, although it is clear that this is done intentionally in order to dilute the situation. If the characters are dancing, they are fooling around with all their might. Or the actor “suddenly” learns from the text that he has died: - Like the deceased? asks Craggs, surprised, and reluctantly leaves the stage.
Most of the action takes place around the fireplace, along the very edge of the stage, only the characters change. Unusual Method works. The story looks cozy, intimate and not too serious. But how, really, to play such a number of tedious moralizing text? Here the actors obediently and patiently read it to each other and to the audience. But, when necessary, the performers give their all, take, for example, the excited dramatic monologue of Marion performed by Maria Kurdenevich in the finale: no reading, lively emotions, experience, intensity of passions. Everything is very serious here. Enhances the freshness of what is happening live music: guitar, violin and clarinet. But not everyone is in the spirit of such experiments - a neighbor from the very beginning of the performance glances at her watch.
Charles Dickens
BATTLE OF LIFE
Tale of love
Part one
Long ago, no matter when, in valiant England, no matter where, a fierce battle was fought. It played out on a long summer day, when, in agitation, many wild flowers, created by the Almighty Hand, to serve as fragrant dew cups, turned green, felt that day how their shiny rims were filled to the brim with blood and, withering, drooped. Many insects, imitating harmless leaves and grasses with their delicate coloration, were stained that day with the blood of dying people and, crawling away in fright, left unusual traces behind them. A motley butterfly carried blood into the air at the edges of its wings. The water in the river turned red. The trampled soil turned into a quagmire, and the muddy puddles, standing in the traces of human feet and horse hooves, gleamed in the sun with that gloomy crimson reflection.
God forbid we see what the moon saw in this field, when, rising over the dark ridge of the distant hills, obscure and indistinct from the trees that crowned it, she rose into the sky and looked at the plain, dotted with people who now lay, motionless, face up, and once, clinging to the mother's breast, they looked for the mother's eyes or rested in a sweet dream! God forbid we learn those secrets that the fetid wind heard, rushing over the place where people fought that day and where death and torment reigned that night! More than once the lonely moon shone over the battlefield, and more than once the stars looked at him with sorrow; more than once the winds that came from all four corners of the world blew over him before the traces of the battle disappeared.
And they did not disappear for a long time, but appeared only in small things, for Nature, which is above the evil human passions, soon regained its lost serenity and smiled at the criminal battlefield, as it smiled at him when it was still innocent. The larks sang above him in the heights; swallows rushed back and forth, fell down like a stone, glided through the air; the shadows of the flying clouds quickly chased each other across the meadows and cornfields, through the forest and rutabaga fields, but over the roofs and belfry of the town, drowned in gardens, and floated away into the bright distance, to the edge of earth and sky, where scarlet sunsets faded. Bread was sown in the fields, and it ripened, and it was put into the granaries; the river, once crimson with blood, now turned the wheel of a watermill; plowmen, whistling, followed the plow; mowers and harvesters calmly went about their work; sheep and oxen grazed in the pasture; the boys shouted and called to each other in the fields, scaring away the birds; smoke rose from the village chimneys; Sunday bells chimed peacefully; old people lived and died; timid field animals and modest flowers in shrubs and gardens grew and died in due time; and all this - on a terrible, blood-stained battlefield, where thousands of people fell in a great battle.
But at first, thick green spots were visible here and there among the growing wheat, and people looked at them with horror. Year after year they appeared in the same places, and it was known that in these fertile areas many people and horses, buried together, lay in the ground fertilized by their bodies. The farmers who plowed these places recoiled at the sight of huge worms teeming there, and the sheaves harvested here were called “sheaves of battle” for many years and piled separately, and no one will remember that at least one such “sheaf of battle” was put together with the last collected with fields in sheaves and brought to the “Harvest Festival”. For a long time, from each furrow drawn here, fragments of weapons were born. For a long time the wounded trees stood on the battlefield; for a long time, fragments of felled hedges and ruined walls lay in places of fierce battles; and not a blade of grass grew in the trampled areas. For a long time not a single village girl dared to pin a flower from this killing field to her hair or corsage - even the most beautiful one - and after many years people still believed that the berries growing there leave unnaturally dark spots on the hand that plucks them.
And yet the years, although they glided one after another as easily as summer clouds across the sky, with the passage of time even destroyed these traces of an old battle and erased the legends about it from the memory of the surrounding inhabitants, until they became like an old fairy tale, which vaguely remember winter evening by the fire, but every year they forget more and more. Where wildflowers and berries had grown untouched for so many years, now gardens were planted, houses were built, and children played war on the lawns. The wounded trees had long ago been turned into firewood that burned and crackled in the fireplaces, and finally burned down. The dark green spots in the loaves were now no brighter than the memory of those who lay beneath them in the ground. From time to time, the plowshare still turned out pieces of rusty metal, but no one could guess what these fragments had once been, and those who found them were perplexed and argued about it among themselves. The old, battered shell and helmet hung in the church over the whitewashed arch for so long that the decrepit, half-blind old man, now trying in vain to examine them from above, recalled how he marveled at them as a child. If the dead here could come to life for a moment - each in his former appearance and each in the place where his untimely death caught him, then hundreds of terrible mutilated warriors would look into the windows and doors of houses; would arise at the hearth of peaceful dwellings; they would fill the barns and granaries like grain; would stand between the baby in the cradle and his nurse; they would float down the river, spin around the mill wheels, invade the orchard, fill up the whole meadow and lie in heaps among the haystacks. This is how the battlefield changed, where thousands and thousands of people fell in a great battle.
Nowhere, perhaps, has it changed so much as where, a hundred years before our time, there grew a small orchard adjoining an old stone house with a porch entwined with honeysuckle - a garden where, one clear autumn morning, music and laughter sounded and where two girls danced cheerfully with each other on the grass, and several village women, standing on ladders, picked apples from apple trees, sometimes looking up from work to admire the girls. What a pleasant, cheerful, simple sight it was: a fine day, a secluded corner and two girls, spontaneous and carefree, dancing joyfully and carefree.
I think - and I hope you will agree with me - that if no one tried to show off, we ourselves would live better, and communication with us would be incomparably more pleasant for others. How good it was to watch these dancing girls! They had no spectators, except for the apple pickers on the stairs. They were pleased to please the pickers, but they danced to please themselves (at least it seemed so from the outside), and it was just as impossible not to admire them as it was impossible for them not to dance. And how they danced!
Not like ballet dancers. Not at all. And not like the students of Madame So-and-so who graduated from the course. Not to any extent. It was not a quadrille, but not even a minuet, not even a peasant dance. They danced not in the old style and not in the new, not in french style and not in English, but perhaps a little bit in spanish style, - although they themselves did not know it, - and this, as I was told, is a free and joyful style, and its charm lies in the fact that the sound of small castanets gives it the character of a charming and free improvisation. Easily spinning after each other, the girls danced now under the trees of the garden, now descending into the grove, then returning to their original place, it seemed that their airy dance was spreading over the sunny expanse, like circles diverging on water. Their loose hair and fluttering skirts, springy grass under their feet, branches rustling in the morning fuss, bright foliage, and spotted shadows from it on the soft young earth, a fragrant wind blowing over the fields and willingly turning the wings of a distant windmill- in a word, everything, starting with both girls and ending with a distant plowman who plowed on a pair of horses, standing out so clearly against the sky, as if everything in the world ended with him - everything seemed to be dancing.
But then the youngest of the dancing sisters, out of breath and laughing merrily, rushed to the bench to rest. Another leaned against a nearby tree. The wandering musicians - the harpist and violinist - fell silent, finishing the game with a brilliant passage - so they probably wanted to show that they were not at all tired, although, to tell the truth, they played at such a fast pace and were so zealous, competing with the dancers, that they could not stand it. half a minute longer. A buzz of approval came from the stairs, and the apple-pickers went back to work like bees.
They took it all the more diligently, perhaps, because an elderly gentleman, none other than Dr. Jedler himself (you should know that both the house and the garden belonged to Dr. Jedler, and the girls were his daughters), hastily went out of the house to find out what happened and who , damn it, so noisy in his estate, and even before breakfast. He was a great philosopher, that Dr. Jedler, and did not like music.
Lighting designer —
Composer —
Speech teacher —
"Battle of Life" - laureate national award « Golden Mask" in nomination " Best Performance small form.
Performance "Battle of Life" based on one of the Christmas stories by Charles Dickens, staged by Sergei Zhenovach - this is a continuation of the search for theatrical expressiveness of the word, an attentive and penetrating reading ancient history in a circle of close people near a burning fireplace.
Sergey Zhenovach about the performance:“For the first time I turn to Dickens' prose, for me this process is fascinating, unexpected. I would like to discover, find the meaning, the nature of Dickens' thinking and playing. “We judge time by the changes within a person,” Dickens thinks. His characters go through time, and time goes through them. They come to the discovery of truths through their actions in this time.
During the rehearsal period the team involved in the play "The Battle of Life" visited England, the homeland of Charles Dickens. During several days of a creative business trip, the actors and the production team visited the Dickens House Museum in London, visited Kent, on the coast, where Dickens and his family rested in the summer and where his country house is still preserved. We wandered through the streets of London, including the Lawyers' Compounds - the scenes of many of the writer's works. Of course, they could not help but look into the "Old Cheshire Cheese", one of the oldest pubs, of which Dickens was a regular. This pub has wonderfully preserved the spirit and atmosphere of 19th century London. The play's designer Alexander Borovsky and the theater's technical director Andrey Spasskin found props and costumes for the future performance at the flea markets in London and its suburbs.
Forbidden for children
The performance runs for 2 hours and 40 minutes with one intermission.
We thank AFK Sistema for their help in creating the performance.
TICKETS: from 500 to 2200 rubles.
Performances start at 19.00.
Charles Dickens
BATTLE OF LIFE
Tale of love
Part one
Long ago, no matter when, in valiant England, no matter where, a fierce battle was fought. It played out on a long summer day, when, in agitation, many wild flowers, created by the Almighty Hand, to serve as fragrant dew cups, turned green, felt that day how their shiny rims were filled to the brim with blood and, withering, drooped. Many insects, imitating harmless leaves and grasses with their delicate coloration, were stained that day with the blood of dying people and, crawling away in fright, left unusual traces behind them. A motley butterfly carried blood into the air at the edges of its wings. The water in the river turned red. The trampled soil turned into a quagmire, and the muddy puddles, standing in the traces of human feet and horse hooves, gleamed in the sun with that gloomy crimson reflection.
God forbid we see what the moon saw in this field, when, rising over the dark ridge of the distant hills, obscure and indistinct from the trees that crowned it, she rose into the sky and looked at the plain, dotted with people who now lay, motionless, face up, and once, clinging to the mother's breast, they looked for the mother's eyes or rested in a sweet dream! God forbid we learn those secrets that the fetid wind heard, rushing over the place where people fought that day and where death and torment reigned that night! More than once the lonely moon shone over the battlefield, and more than once the stars looked at him with sorrow; more than once the winds that came from all four corners of the world blew over him before the traces of the battle disappeared.
And they did not disappear for a long time, but appeared only in small things, for Nature, which is above the evil human passions, soon regained its lost serenity and smiled at the criminal battlefield, as it smiled at him when it was still innocent. The larks sang above him in the heights; swallows rushed back and forth, fell down like a stone, glided through the air; the shadows of the flying clouds quickly chased each other across the meadows and cornfields, through the forest and rutabaga fields, but over the roofs and belfry of the town, drowned in gardens, and floated away into the bright distance, to the edge of earth and sky, where scarlet sunsets faded. Bread was sown in the fields, and it ripened, and it was put into the granaries; the river, once crimson with blood, now turned the wheel of a watermill; plowmen, whistling, followed the plow; mowers and harvesters calmly went about their work; sheep and oxen grazed in the pasture; the boys shouted and called to each other in the fields, scaring away the birds; smoke rose from the village chimneys; Sunday bells chimed peacefully; old people lived and died; timid field animals and modest flowers in shrubs and gardens grew and died in due time; and all this - on a terrible, blood-stained battlefield, where thousands of people fell in a great battle.
But at first, thick green spots were visible here and there among the growing wheat, and people looked at them with horror. Year after year they appeared in the same places, and it was known that in these fertile areas many people and horses, buried together, lay in the ground fertilized by their bodies. The farmers who plowed these places recoiled at the sight of huge worms teeming there, and the sheaves harvested here were called “sheaves of battle” for many years and piled separately, and no one will remember that at least one such “sheaf of battle” was put together with the last collected with fields in sheaves and brought to the “Harvest Festival”. For a long time, from each furrow drawn here, fragments of weapons were born. For a long time the wounded trees stood on the battlefield; for a long time, fragments of felled hedges and ruined walls lay in places of fierce battles; and not a blade of grass grew in the trampled areas. For a long time not a single village girl dared to pin a flower from this killing field to her hair or corsage - even the most beautiful one - and after many years people still believed that the berries growing there leave unnaturally dark spots on the hand that plucks them.
And yet the years, although they glided one after another as easily as summer clouds across the sky, with the passage of time even destroyed these traces of an old battle and erased the legends about it from the memory of the surrounding inhabitants, until they became like an old fairy tale, which they vaguely remember on a winter evening by the fire, but every year they forget more and more. Where wildflowers and berries had grown untouched for so many years, now gardens were planted, houses were built, and children played war on the lawns. The wounded trees had long ago been turned into firewood that burned and crackled in the fireplaces, and finally burned down. The dark green stains in the loaves were now no brighter than the memory of those who lay beneath them in the ground. From time to time, the plowshare still turned out pieces of rusty metal, but no one could guess what these fragments had once been, and those who found them were perplexed and argued about it among themselves. The old, battered shell and helmet hung in the church over the whitewashed arch for so long that the decrepit, half-blind old man, now trying in vain to examine them from above, recalled how he marveled at them as a child. If the dead here could come to life for a moment - each in his former appearance and each in the place where his untimely death caught him, then hundreds of terrible mutilated warriors would look into the windows and doors of houses; would arise at the hearth of peaceful dwellings; they would fill the barns and granaries like grain; would stand between the baby in the cradle and his nurse; they would float down the river, spin around the mill wheels, invade the orchard, fill up the whole meadow and lie in heaps among the haystacks. This is how the battlefield changed, where thousands and thousands of people fell in a great battle.
Nowhere, perhaps, has it changed so much as where, a hundred years before our time, there grew a small orchard adjoining an old stone house with a porch entwined with honeysuckle - a garden where, one clear autumn morning, music and laughter sounded and where two girls danced cheerfully with each other on the grass, and several village women, standing on ladders, picked apples from apple trees, sometimes looking up from work to admire the girls. What a pleasant, cheerful, simple sight it was: a fine day, a secluded corner and two girls, spontaneous and carefree, dancing joyfully and carefree.
I think - and I hope you will agree with me - that if no one tried to show off, we ourselves would live better, and communication with us would be incomparably more pleasant for others. How good it was to watch these dancing girls! They had no spectators, except for the apple pickers on the stairs. They were pleased to please the pickers, but they danced to please themselves (at least it seemed so from the outside), and it was just as impossible not to admire them as it was impossible for them not to dance. And how they danced!
