"The Good Man of Sezuan". Yuri Butusov

The legendary performance of the Taganka Theatre. This is not a review of the performance, but rather an attempt to declare love for the legendary performance.
For me, acquaintance with began with this performance. It so happened that it was from him. It was back in 1986. Then the Taganka Theater played performances on two stages: the New and the Old. At that time, the old stage was closed for repairs, and all performances were on the New Stage of the Theatre. The theater was directed by a remarkable and legendary director of the 20th century. Old performances by Y. Lyubimov and new performances by A. Efros were simultaneously running at the theater. Interestingly, the programs for the performances did not indicate who the director, the artist of the performance was. For the first time I saw the play "The Good Man from Sezuan" on the New Stage of the Theater (in three more acts).
What I saw in 1986, for me then still a young man, was a real discovery, a breakthrough in my knowledge of theatrical art. The performance, which has already passed 22 years, was probably also childishly fresh and pure, as in the days of the premiere student performances. Immediately struck and made me fall in love with the successful harmony of the performance: the music (and always live), a single team of actors, successful scenography. The performance lived on the stage, which is extremely rare in theaters today (continuous existence and serving a performance). With all this, it seems to me that Y. Lyubimov successfully came up with a stage form for presenting the dramaturgy of B. Brecht. This is a grotesque, which skillfully bordered on light buffoonery. Quick and skillful transition from funny to tragic and vice versa. Plus a direct appeal to the audience, ie. the desire somewhere to voice as much as possible, to convey the problems expressed in the play, were solved by Yu. Lyubimov as the actor’s rapid exit from the stage image into the image of a person from the author, a person from the podium (orator). This combination gave such a strong emotional discharge to the audience that it could not leave the audience indifferent to what was happening.
I always remember those chords at the beginning of the performance, when all the actors jump out onto the stage to pronounce the prologue to the performance. The prologue sets the tone for the entire play. And then the performance began. The performance swept by so fast that while watching it, you always had the feeling that you yourself were a living participant in this story. Even at this performance, for the first time I felt the harmony between the auditorium and the stage. I've heard a lot about this before, but I've never experienced it myself. But it's interesting that I was struck by a performance of just such an unusual, innovative form. I had seen many performances of the classical form before him, but none of them stuck with me for a long time. But as they say, it is in classical performances that it is possible to make the hall control, to subjugate it to oneself. And here is the harmony of the name of the whole performance, I emphasize everything, and the auditorium.
After many years, I return to it again and again. And again and again I feel the feeling that I experienced at the first viewing of the play. This is my performance. He sits in me. And every time I want to return to it again and again. Perhaps I have the right to say so. The performance gives me an emotional and vital charge for a long time, until the next viewing. This is a play about sadness, human lies, joy and life's truth. We must live and love. And be able to forgive, and not look for right and wrong. Life strives, but questions remain eternal. But less and less real people solve them. That's what this performance is about, about life's eccentrics.
To date, I have seen the play six times. I always try to take my friends and relatives with me to this performance. Someone likes him, someone ends his relationship with Taganka, but the problems that are raised in the play are still built into them. At least for a while.
Now about those who once played in the play, i.e. actors that I have seen. Names: (inimitable voice timbre, conveying the depth of feelings and compressed nerves), (sensitive and sincere water carrier Wang, saw his short new return to the play), (evil and selfish Yang Sun), (here is the naive and simple water carrier Wang) , (unsurpassed and inimitable Mi Tqi, landlady), (sincere and honest carpenter Ling Tuo with beautiful and clear eyes),

Yuri Butusov staged a performance based on the play by Bertolt Brecht, adjusted to the point of gesture, frightening and beautiful in its certainty.

For the sake of a social experiment, he imagined himself a god capable of teaching people how to get out of poverty - the causes of all evil on earth. And he composed a parable: the Chinese gods were ready to forgive mankind if they could find at least one good person. Pretending to be beggars, the three of them descended into Sezuan, starving from crop failure, where they met a kind prostitute, Shen Te, who let them under her roof. So the gods put all the responsibility on her: they say, come on, hurry to do good, and we'll see. Shen Te diligently began to distribute rice to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, until both sat on her head in unison. Then her second “I” woke up in a kind woman - a tough and resourceful businessman Shui Ta, who began to exploit and profit from this lumpen.

“Distributing or exploiting” is not at all the problem that worries who put “The Good Man from Sezuan” in. Is good possible today? How can a person who is not indifferent to others survive? And is love now primarily vulnerability?

The director, together with co-author-scenographer Alexander Shishkin, stripped the stage naked, turning it into a huge dark world, pulsing with flashes of harsh light and the rhythms of Paul Dessau's electronic music performed by the Pure Music ensemble. Here, nothing has a cover: in a bare box without walls, the door does not close anyone from anyone, the unmade iron bed stands as if in a ditch, the trees hang without foliage. The inhabitants, in order to at least hide behind something, turn themselves into masks, grotesque and one-dimensional. So, the brutal actor Alexander Matrosov, in front of the audience, turns into a weak fool - the water seller Wang. When people lose their words due to impotence or rage, they begin to chant-sing Zongs in German, which sounds tough, demanding and beautiful. And into this world, Butusov releases a lonely God - a fragile, bloody leg in search of a kind person, a silent girl (). And she meets the lonely and fragile Shen Te () exhausted by other people's desires. And they both decide to love their neighbors.

Ursulyak plays Shen Te, who doesn't turn into Shui Ta for a minute. But when despair rises in her throat, she allows herself to put on the mask of a cynical pragmatist (simply sticks a paper mustache and sideburns on herself) so that she has the strength to say no. And in the mask of evil, she continues to distribute the wealth he has acquired to those in need. Distribute anonymously, not out of modesty, but so as not to reveal the secret and ruin a good deed. Strolling like a little gentleman wrapped in a scarf, she hides all the same suffering eyes under her frowning brows. Shen Te, even for a moment, is still allowed happiness: she loves an unemployed pilot, handsome Yang Sun, and hears his reciprocal confessions. And Shui Ta is forced to listen to the impudent revelations of his beloved, who, it turns out, only needs money. Alexander Arsentiev is the only one who plays Young without a mask, because his egoism is so natural.

After a frivolous, excessive and driving in, he staged a performance, adjusted to a gesture, frightening and beautiful in its certainty, throwing a kind person onto the stage, as if onto a red-hot roof. But Alexandra Ursulyak plays Shen Te without fear of getting burned.

Photo by Sergey Petrov

Good man from Sesuan. Moscow Taganka Theater. 1964

The Good Man from Sesuan (Bertolt Brecht)
Theater name: Moscow Taganka Theater Genre: Parable-play Premiere: 1964
Duration: 02:46:59
Author: Bertolt Brecht Director: Yuri Lyubimov
Music: Anatoly Vasiliev, Boris Khmelnitsky
Translation from German by Y. Yuzovsky and E. Ionova, verses translated by B. Slutsky

Add. Information: The performance, which began the history of the theater.
The premiere took place on April 23, 1964.
Grand Prix of the International Theater Festival in Greece 1999
Videotape - October 2010

Fragment of the play "The Good Man from Sezuan"

The Good Man from Sezuan with Vysotsky at the Taganka Theatre.

Fragments of the play "The Good Man from Sezuan"

Fragment of the first part of the documentary trilogy "Theatrical etude on Taganskaya themes".
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Saint Never Day Vladimir Vysotsky

Włodzimierz Wysocki - Pieśni [songs]. Więcej o Wołodii na mojej stronie http://www.vysotsky.neostrada.pl/ [Lyrics: Bertolt Brecht]
Words: B. Brecht, music. A.Vasiliev and B.Khmelnitsky. Performed in the play "The Good Man from Cezuan".

On this day, evil is taken by the throat,
On this day, everyone is lucky
Both the owner and the laborer all march together to the tavern,
On Saint's Day, the skinny one never drinks at the fat one's house.

The river rolls its waters back,
Everyone, brother, is kind, you don’t hear about the evil ones,
On this day, everyone rests, and no one urges -
On the day of the saint Never the whole earth, like paradise, is fragrant.

On this day you will be a general, ha ha!
Well, I would fly that day.
In [....], you will find peace,
On the day of Saint Never, woman, you will find peace.

We can no longer wait
That's why they must give us, yes, give:
people of hard work
Saint Never Day, Saint Never Day
The day we will rest!

I made a post from pieces, excerpts from books and articles. When you put together the puzzles of text and video, I hope that you will feel the atmosphere of the theater, or rather one very interesting performance, that's what I wanted to express in my post:

During Brecht's lifetime, his relations with the Soviet theater were, to put it mildly, not particularly successful. The main reasons were the official theater's ideological rejection of Brecht's artistic searches, as well as the paradoxical nature of Brecht's figure, which rather irritated the authorities. Mutual hostility was mutual. On the one hand, in the 1920s and 1950s, Brecht's plays were almost never staged by domestic theaters. On the other hand, the acquaintance of the German playwright himself with Soviet theatrical practice more than once plunged him into despondency.

Brecht found himself in the Soviet chalk circle. It was only at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, after his death, that rare productions of his plays appeared. Among the first and most significant should be mentioned: "Dreams of Simone Machar" in the Moscow Theater. M. Yermolova directed by Anatoly Efros (1959); "Mother Courage and her children" at the Moscow Academic Theater. Vl. Mayakovsky (staged by Maxim Strauch) (1960); “The Good Man from Sezuan” at the Leningrad Academic Theater. Pushkin (1962, director - Rafail Suslovich); “The Career of Arturo Ui” at the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theatre. Gorky (1963, directed by Erwin Axer).

However, these and some other productions of the thaw by Brecht pale before the significance of one educational student performance. In 1963, young Vakhtangov students, third (!) year students of the Theater School named after B.V. Shchukin, presented the fruit of their six-month work - the play "The Good Man from Sezuan" staged by the course teacher Yuri Lyubimov.

His success was stunning. In the last year of the thaw, in a small hall of the Shchukin school on Stary Arbat (later it was played on other stages in Moscow), the performance was watched by I. Ehrenburg, K. Simonov, A. Voznesensky, E. Yevtushenko, B. Okudzhava, B. Akhmadulina, V. Aksenov, Yu. Trifonov, A. Galich, O. Efremov, M. Plisetskaya, R. Shchedrin... It would seem that the next student production was perceived by the Moscow public not only as a theatrical breakthrough, but also as a kind of public manifesto , a banner that promised a change of time. It is very symptomatic that a year later, on April 23, 1964, Liubovskiy's "The Good Man from Sezuan" will open a new theater - the Taganka Theater, in which it is still being performed.
(Excerpt from an article on Brecht's work.)

Moscow is an amazing city - everyone there knows everything from rumors. Rumor has it that some interesting performance is being prepared. And since everyone is bored, and diplomats too, if something interesting, then there will be a scandal. As my late friend Erdman said, “if there is no scandal around the theater, then this is not a theater.” So in that sense he was a prophet to me. And so it was. Well, it's boring, and everyone wants to come, see, and they know that if it's interesting, then it will be closed. Therefore, the performance could not start for a long time, the audience burst into the hall. These diplomats sat on the floor in the aisle, a fireman ran in, a pale director, rector of the school, said that "he will not allow it, because the hall may collapse." In the hall, where there are two hundred and forty people, about four hundred sit - in general, there was a complete scandal. I stood with a lantern - the electrics there were very bad, and I myself stood and led the lantern. Brecht's portrait was highlighted in the right places. And I kept driving this lantern and shouting:

For God's sake, let the performance continue, what are you doing, because the performance will be closed, no one will see it! Why are you stomping, don't you understand where you live, you idiots!

Still, I calmed them down. But, of course, everything was recorded and reported. Well, they closed after that.
An excerpt from the book by Yuri Lyubimov "Stories of an old talker"

"The Good Man from Szechuan" Bertolt Brecht (German: Der gute Mensch von Sezuan) 1940
Brief summary of the play (for those who do not know what it is at all)))

The main city of Sichuan province, which summarizes all places on the globe and any time in which a person exploits a person - this is the place and time of the play.

Prologue. For two thousand years now, the cry has not stopped: it cannot go on like this! No one in this world is able to be kind! And the worried gods decided: the world can remain as it is if there are enough people capable of living a life worthy of a person. And to test this, the three most prominent gods descend to earth. Perhaps the water carrier Wang, who was the first to meet them and treat them with water (by the way, he is the only one in Sichuan who knows that they are gods), is a worthy person? But his mug, the gods noticed, had a double bottom. A good water carrier is a scammer! The simplest test of the first virtue - hospitality - upsets them: in none of the rich houses: neither at Mr. Fo's, nor at Mr. Chen's, nor at the widow Su's - Wang can find accommodation for them. There is only one thing left: to turn to the prostitute Shen De, after all, she cannot refuse anyone. And the gods spend the night with the only kind person, and in the morning, saying goodbye, they leave Shen De an order to remain as kind, as well as a good payment for the night: after all, how to be kind when everything is so expensive!

I. The gods left Shen De a thousand silver dollars, and with them she bought herself a small tobacco shop. But how many people in need of help are close to those who are lucky: the former owner of the shop and the former owners of Shen De - husband and wife, her lame brother and pregnant daughter-in-law, nephew and niece, old grandfather and boy - and everyone needs a roof over their heads and food. “Salvation is a small boat / Immediately goes to the bottom. / After all, there are too many drowning / Greedily grabbed the sides.

And here the carpenter demands a hundred silver dollars, which the former mistress did not pay him for the shelves, and the landlady needs recommendations and a guarantee for the not very respectable Shen De. “My cousin will vouch for me,” she says. “And he will pay for the shelves.”

II. And the next morning, Shoi Da, Shen De's cousin, appears in the tobacco shop. Resolutely chasing away unlucky relatives, skillfully forcing the carpenter to take only twenty silver dollars, Prudently making friends with the policeman, he settles the affairs of his too-kind cousin.

III. And in the evening in the city park, Shen De meets an unemployed pilot Song. A pilot without a plane, a mail pilot without mail. What should he do in the world, even if he read all the books about flying in a Beijing school, even if he knows how to land an airplane on the ground, as if it were his own ass? He is like a crane with a broken wing, and there is nothing for him to do on earth. The rope is at the ready, and there are as many trees in the park as you like. But Shen De does not let him hang himself. To live without hope is to do evil. Hopeless is the song of a water carrier selling water in the rain: “Thunder rumbles and it rains, / Well, I sell water, / But water is not for sale / And it is not drunk in any. / I shout: “Buy water!” / But no one buys. / In my pocket for this water / Nothing gets in! / Buy some water, dogs!”

Yi Shen De buys a mug of water for her beloved Yang Song.

Vladimir Vysotsky and Zinaida Slavina in the play "The Good Man from Sezuan". 1978

IV. Returning after a night spent with his beloved, Shen De sees the morning city for the first time, cheerful and giving fun. People are kind today. The old carpet merchants from the shop across the street lend dear Shen De two hundred silver dollars, enough to pay off the landlady for six months. Nothing is difficult for a person who loves and hopes. And when Song's mother, Ms. Yang, tells that for a huge amount of five hundred silver dollars, her son was promised a place, she happily gives her the money received from the old people. But where to get another three hundred? There is only one way out - to turn to Shoi Da. Yes, he is too cruel and cunning. But a pilot must fly!

Sideshows. Shen De enters, holding the mask and costume of Shoi Da, and sings “The Song of the Helplessness of Gods and Good People”: “The good people in our country / They cannot remain kind. / To reach the cup with a spoon, / Cruelty is needed. / The good ones are helpless, and the gods are powerless. / Why don't the gods say there, on the ether, / What time to give all kind and good / The opportunity to live in a good, kind world?

V. Clever and prudent Shoy Da, whose eyes are not blinded by love, sees deceit. Yang Sun is not afraid of cruelty and meanness: let the place promised to him be someone else's, and the pilot who will be fired from him has a large family, let Shen De part with the shop, besides which she has nothing, and the old people will lose their two hundred dollars and lose their housing , just to get your way. Such a one cannot be trusted, and Shoy Da seeks support in a rich barber who is ready to marry Shen De. But the mind is powerless where love is at work, and Shen De leaves with Sun: “I want to leave with the one I love, / I don’t want to think about whether it’s good. / I don't want to know if he loves me. / I want to leave with the one I love.”

VI. A small cheap restaurant in the suburbs is preparing for the wedding of Yang Sun and Shen De. Bride in wedding dress, groom in tuxedo. But the ceremony still does not start, and the bonza looks at his watch - the groom and his mother are waiting for Shoi Da, who should bring three hundred silver dollars. Yang Song sings "Song of Saint Never's Day": "On this day, evil is taken by the throat, / On this day, all the poor are lucky, / Both the master and the laborer / Walk together to the tavern / On Saint Never's day / The skinny one drinks at the fat one at a party . / We can no longer wait. / That's why they should give us, / People of hard work, / Saint Never Day, / Saint Never Day, / Day when we will rest.

“He will never come again,” Ms. Yang says. Three are sitting and two of them are looking at the door.

VII. Shen De's meager possessions are on a cart near the tobacco shop - the shop had to be sold in order to repay the debt to the old people. The barber Shu Fu is ready to help: he will give his barracks for the poor, whom Shen De helps (you can’t keep goods there anyway - it’s too damp), and write out a check. And Shen De is happy: she felt in herself a future son - a pilot, "a new conqueror / Inaccessible mountains and unknown regions!" But how to protect him from the cruelty of this world? She sees the carpenter's little son, who is looking for food in the garbage can, and swears that she will not rest until she saves her son, at least him alone. It's time to be your cousin again.

Mr. Shoi Da announces to the audience that his cousin will not leave them without help in the future, but from now on, the distribution of food without reciprocal services stops, and in the houses of Mr. Shu Fu there will be one who agrees to work for Shen De.

VIII. The tobacco factory that Shoi Da set up in the barracks is staffed by men, women and children. The overseer - and cruel - here is Yang Sun: he is not at all sad about the change of fate and shows that he is ready for anything for the interests of the company. But where is Shen De? Where is the good man? Where is the one who many months ago on a rainy day in a moment of joy bought a mug of water from a water carrier? Where is she and her unborn child that she told the water carrier about? And Sun would also like to know this: if his ex-fiancee was pregnant, then he, as the father of the child, can apply for the position of the owner. And here, by the way, in the knot of her dress. Has not the cruel cousin killed the unfortunate woman? The police come to the house. Mr. Shoi Da is facing trial.

X. In the courtroom, Shen De's friends (Wang the water carrier, old couple, grandfather and niece) and Shoi Da's partners (Mr. Shu Fu and the landlady) are waiting for the hearing to begin. At the sight of the judges entering the hall, Shoi Da faints - these are the gods. The gods are by no means omniscient: under the mask and costume of Shoi Da, they do not recognize Shen De. And only when, unable to withstand the accusations of the good and the intercession of the evil, Shoi Da takes off his mask and tears off his clothes, the gods see with horror that their mission has failed: their good man and the evil and callous Shoi Da are one person. It is not possible in this world to be kind to others and at the same time to yourself, you cannot save others and not destroy yourself, you cannot make everyone happy and yourself with everyone together! But the gods have no time to understand such complexities. Is it possible to refuse the commandments? No never! Recognize that the world must be changed? How? By whom? No, everything is okay. And they reassure people: “Shen De did not die, she was only hidden. There is a good man among you." And to Shen De’s desperate cry: “But I need a cousin,” they hastily answer: “But not too often!” And while Shen De stretches out his hands to them in despair, they, smiling and nodding, disappear above.

Epilogue. The final monologue of the actor in front of the public: “Oh, my venerable public! The end is unimportant. This I know. / In our hands, the most beautiful fairy tale suddenly received a bitter denouement. / The curtain is lowered, and we stand in embarrassment - we have not found the issues of resolution. / So what's the deal? We are not looking for benefits, / So, there must be some right way out? / You can’t imagine for money - what! Another hero? What if the world is different? / Maybe other gods are needed here? Or no gods at all? I am silent in anxiety. / So help us! Correct the trouble - and direct your thought and mind here. / Try to find good for good - good ways. / Bad ending - discarded in advance. / He must, must, must be good!”

T. A. Voznesenskaya retold.

Igor Merkulov

The play is a parabola by Bertolt Brecht,

Actors and performers:

Annotation for the play "The Good Man from Sesuan" based on the play by Bertolt Brecht

Written in the 30s of the last century, the play has long become a world classic and a kind of measure of the readiness of the theater and its public to comprehend the original philosophy of the author. The most famous theaters in the world did not bypass this play with their attention. In Russia, in the 60s, the Lyubimov Taganka Theater announced its birth by staging this particular play. In 2013, the Moscow theater named after. Pushkin surprised and delighted the capital's theater-goers with a new interpretation of Brecht's "Kind Man ...". This year, Kaliningraders will be able to form their own opinion about Brecht's dramaturgy and evaluate its reading by the director and actors of our theater.

The action takes place in China, in the non-existent city of Sichuan invented by Brecht (Sezuan is in the European reading). The main character is a priestess of love, a kind, trusting woman who finds a completely unusual way to protect herself from the evil world and evil people. Will she succeed? The viewer will have to find the answer to this question.

This is the story of a woman and her love, but our performance is not a melodrama. This is a story about a non-existent world and its heroes, but our performance is not fantasy. This is a story about spiritual torment and search, but our performance is not a classic drama. In this story, you will visit the court, but this is not a detective story. What kind of Brechtian story will be in our performance, only one person now knows - its director Igor Merkulov, who specially came from Moscow to stage this play.

According to the sketches of the production designer Vladimir Pavlyuk (St. Petersburg), the theater workshops have already begun to create a colorful world on the stage, permeated with Chinese aesthetics. The scenery and costumes are bright, elegant, exotic for the European eye, and worthy of becoming an object of special attention of the public in their own right. A very important topic is the music of the performance. There will be a lot of it - classical works of Paul Dessau for this play, vocal singing, national Chinese melodies and even rock.

There is a big and very interesting work of the whole theater to create a new performance. You have the opportunity to evaluate it personally on February 28, March 1 and 7 at the premiere shows.

03/07/2015 Were at the play "The Good Man from Sezuan". The first act barely sat through. Very delayed. From the second, they left. The storyline itself is interesting, but the staging is a mess. The acting was very disappointing. They played sluggishly, you can even compare it with an "art circle". Everyone was on stage on his own, and not in one performance. I did not like the costumes, a lot of modern fabrics were used, although the epoch of the last century was displayed in the performance. The songs were sung very loudly and the microphone phoned. It is unfortunate that a trip to the theater left a negative impression on this performance. Perhaps the directors of the performance and the actors will create a more pleasant impression of the performance in the future.

[email protected] Filippov Ilya ( [email protected] )

I went to the play "The Good Man from Sezuan" on March 7th.

Alexander

Good man and Sezuana. Briefly about the play: Genre Parabola - the geometry of eternal movement: the outcome-existence-return. Ideally, to a height not less than the starting point of the movement. But this is ideal. More often than not, it's the other way around. Unfortunately, "Kind Man" is from the "most often" cohort. Unfortunately, the performance didn't go well. Of course, this is my personal opinion. And these lines are with sincere love for our theatre. Metaphysics of design. “What kind of power is this, forever striving for evil and always doing good?” - so or almost so asks the great Goethe. An existential paradox with no solution. Neither "positive" nor "negative". The idea, you see, is non-trivial. How to convey the inseparability of "good" and "evil" by means of art? Reception is known - a split personality. Transcendence in sunglasses. Heroes "from eternity", such as, for example, the gods, certainly need the appropriate attributes. How to show "eternity" in theatrical ways? For example, the imposition of costumes of one era on the costumes of another era. Main character. There are three Marina Jungans in the Kaliningrad Drama Theater: 1. Photo in the foyer. 2. The main character in "The Good Man" 3. Alter ego Shen De - Shoi Da. There is only one question - why was she “forced” to walk with an absurd “male” gait with torticollis? Dear Natalia Sales. Her temperament and thirst for life-play is such that it is high time for the theater to stage The Idiot or The Karamazovs, even if only specifically for it. Annoying inconsistencies. Mostly explainable and easily fixable. The costumes and stage are magnificent, amazing! The stage setting is beyond praise.

Svetlana

Amendment to Alexey's review dated 03/03/2015 at 01:18. You wrote so much positive (I don’t agree with you in many ways, but this is a personal opinion that will still remain with each of us) about the actresses in the play “The Good Man from Cezuan”, not even knowing that Sh. was played by Maria Savelyeva, and not Anastasia Bashkina (

[email protected] Katerina ( [email protected] )

My husband and I went to the premiere of "The Good Man of Cezuan" on Sunday. I don't understand why there are so many positive reviews? We can hardly wait for the end of the first act! They just ran away! If THIS is called acting?! Then I don’t know .. Some kind of booth. The only thing that was pleasing to the eye was the scenery. And this cabaret girl? From her screams and singing, her ears were pawned. Dancing out of sync, incomprehensible costume changes, and what are these "Gods" worth?! Waste of money and time! It's sad to call it theater!

Vladimir

The play is a kind man from CESOUAN. I did not understand anything. True, the wife is satisfied - Beautiful,

Thanks to the actors and the theater for the new premiere, "The Good Man from Cezuan". It was interesting to me, I read Brecht at the philological faculty at the university, I didn’t think that it was we who dared to put it on. The conflict of cultures is very interesting. Very colorful and, of course, non-standard. Of the actors, the performers of the roles of the Water Carrier and the Pilot were especially impressed, beautiful dances and costumes.

Vasily Alekseevich

I do not like to write reviews, especially for performances, the impression of which should be subjective. But in the case of the play "The Good Man from Cezuan", I will not answer anyone's question whether to go to it or not. The fact is that the production caused me very strange ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, I saw a very beautiful performance, stop the action at any moment, there will be a great shot. The actors have chic costumes, excellent make-up, some actors seem to be real Chinese. But on the other hand, it is not clear why, some of the actors begin to change into more modern clothes already from 20-30 minutes of action. The idea of ​​the creators of the play here is most likely in an attempt to get away from specifics and direct reference to the place of events, because those who are familiar with Brecht's play know that China, where the action allegedly takes place, is a very conditional place. This is such an attempt to approach the parable. Also, the authors clearly wanted to show that even the Gods are moving away from the eternal towards modernity and manufacturability. But why do costumes change gradually and not for everyone? The idea is logical, interesting, but somehow ill-conceived. On the one hand, good actors play, I saw them in the latest productions of the drama theater, but here they seem to be in the wrong place, and for this you don’t believe almost anyone. I am extremely far from the work of the director and the choice of people for certain roles, but at least the replacement of the actress who plays the main Shin De with the actress who plays her alter ego looks very obvious (and we discussed with a large group of acquaintances during the intermission of these actresses, we really like them, and everyone agreed in the same opinion). And the actresses are not offended, both roles are the main ones. And the performance gets a fragile, gentle, kind girl in the form of Bashkina Anastasia (a man's jacket on her, by the way, would also look cool) and sexy defiant Marina Yungans as a screaming alter ego. By the way, as for the main characters, why did they make a water carrier out of our beloved Maxim Patserin - a stuttering half-wit. His character in the book was normal and did not stutter (or am I confusing something?). There are dances in the performance, which is great, they give the action even more colors and variety, especially with umbrellas. They could smooth out some of the roughness and imperfections of the performance, but they immediately became another "imperfection" themselves. Why are the dances not staged. It can be seen that they wanted to use elements of Chinese dance, it turned out a lot (as it seemed to me - it didn’t seem to a professional), but why aren’t the couples simply arranged around the stage? The actors interfered with each other, clustered together. The feeling that the artists simply did not mark the points on the stage. In general, duality and ambiguity in everything, except for the duality that Brecht put into his work. After all, the main problem that is clearly raised in the work is the problem of two people who live inside each of us, how to be good and tough, try to be fair, but do as your heart tells you. I didn’t see the tragedy, I just looked at a certain set of sketches ... with a very beautiful picture. There is no integrity from the performance, but at the same time, the picture with the rain was reproduced in the eyes of the whole evening and the next day. In any case, thanks a lot.