Photo by Mikhail Guterman The acting temperament of Lyudmila Maksakova and Vladimir Ilyin looks out from the general directorial concept
	Marina Shimadina. . Chekhov's play directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus ( Kommersant, 07/11/2003). Alexander Sokolyansky. . A great performance was born in Moscow ( News time, 07/11/2003). Grigory Zaslavsky. "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus and the International Stanislavsky Foundation ( NG, 07/11/2003). Alena Karas. . The great Lithuanian Eymuntas Nyakroshyus staged "The Cherry Orchard" with Russian artists ( Russian newspaper, 07/11/2003). Vera Maksimova. The last Moscow theatrical sensation took place when the season was already over, the theaters parted, some were on tour, and most were just on vacation because of the heat ( Rodnaya newspaper, 07/11/2003). Marina Davydova. . Moscow theater season closes ( Izvestia, 07/11/2003) Marina Raikin. . Chekhov lacked only grandfather Mazai ( MK, 07/11/2003) Dina Goder. . The premiere of "The Cherry Orchard" directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus - miracles of seduction, bird chirping, dead hares and unexpected roles ( Gazeta.Ru, 07/10/2003). Elena Yampolskaya. . The most pretentious performance of the season was played - "The Cherry Orchard" directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus ( Russian courier, 07/11/2003) Polina Bogdanova. A. Chekhov was staged by the Lithuanian director E. Nyakroshyus ( Novye Izvestiya, 07/10/2003) Irina Korneeva. The premiere of "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus took place at the STD Theater Center ( MN time, 07/10/2003). Oleg Zintsov. . Eymuntas Nyakroshyus gave Moscow the "Cherry Orchard" ( Vedomosti, 14.07.2003). Natalya Zimyanina. ( Evening Moscow, 07/11/2003). Artur Solomonov. . Eymuntas Nyakroshyus staged Chekhov ( Newspaper, 14.07.2003) Elena Dyakova. . A.P. Chekhov "The Cherry Orchard" ( Novaya Gazeta, 07/14/2003). Marina Zayonts. . The International K. S. Stanislavsky Foundation in the newly opened premises of the STD Cultural Center showed "The Cherry Orchard" staged by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus ( Results, 15.07.2003). Irina Alpatova. . Russian debut of Eymuntas Nyakroshyus ( Culture, 17.07.2003). Inna Vishnevskaya. . "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshus ( LG, 23.07.2003). Alla Shenderova. . premature conclusions ( Screen and stage, number 27, 2003). Marina Davydova. Eymuntas Nyakroshus: "I don't understand how you can be on stage at all" (Izvestia, 16.07.2003).

The Cherry Orchard. Directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshus. Press about the play

Kommersant, July 11, 2003

The garden is pitch-black

Chekhov's play directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus

In Moscow, on the stage of the recently built STD cultural center on Strastnoy Boulevard, the most anticipated premiere of this season took place - "The Cherry Orchard" staged by the famous Lithuanian director Eymuntas Nyakroshus with Russian actors. The joint project of the Stanislavsky Foundation and the Lithuanian theater "Meno Fortas" did not meet all the expectations of MARINA SHIMADINA.

Moscow theatrical circles talked about this premiere in whispers, as if they were afraid to frighten off a bird of luck that had suddenly flown to us. To get Eymuntas Nyakroshyus himself, a brilliant gloomy Lithuanian who works only in his homeland, in the Meno Fortas theater he created, but collects all kinds of theater awards all over Europe, for a production in Moscow, seemed an unheard-of happiness. Since the Lithuanian student graduated from Andrei Goncharov's course at GITIS, he has not worked in Moscow. And suddenly he agreed to the proposal of the Stanislavsky Foundation. Probably, the director considered it a beautiful symbolic gesture to transfer the "Garden" to the stage in the year of the centenary of this play and in the city from where it began its triumphal procession around the world. So this production was previously assigned an exceptional role in the history of modern theater.

Indifferent to Russian theatrical regalia, Eymuntas Nyakroshyus invited both well-deserved and eminent, as well as very young actors to the performance and assembled a strong and talented team. The distribution of roles even before the performance seemed ideal. And the premiere only confirmed the director's sniper accuracy. Lyudmila Maksakova turned out to be the ideal Ranevskaya, regally feminine and at the same time somehow nervous, lost and deeply unhappy. The actress lays down the colors backwards, with rough, passionate strokes. One of the most powerful scenes is when Ranevskaya finds out that the cherry orchard has been sold. The actress’s face suddenly becomes haggard, her eyes faded, and while Lopakhin pours out his soul in front of her, rejoicing at the purchase, she sits with an absent look and, whistling softly, with mechanical monotonous gestures, lures some imaginary bird towards her, like a crazy Ophelia. Gaev, performed by Vladimir Ilyin, turned out to be unexpected, but very convincing - about this cozy and beautiful-hearted fat man who loves to pamper his nieces with sweets, you can really say that he "ate a fortune on candy".

One of the main successes of the performance is Yermolai Lopakhin performed by Yevgeny Mironov. Usually this role is treated flatly: a rude man who is not able to appreciate the useless, unprofitable beauty of the cherry orchard. This Lopakhin is completely different, subtle and sensitive. It is evident that he is in love with this alien world in general and Ranevskaya in particular. Turned pale, with deadly determination on his face, he makes a confession to her and, stretching out in front of her at attention, apparently from an excess of feelings and a lack of words, suddenly tightens some Russian folk song. Well declared themselves in this performance and young actors. Their work looked even more advantageous due to its unexpectedness. Inga Strelkova-Oboldina played the "nun" Varya in a very interesting way, Yulia Marchenko definitely got into the image of a very young childish Anya. The handsome and intellectual Igor Gordin reincarnated as the awkward and angular, rumpled by life, rude and tongue-twistering eternal student Petya Trofimov.

Aleksey Petrenko's Firs is inimitably good: hunched, with a shuffling gait and a muffled old man's voice, he nevertheless makes a monumental impression as a symbol of the unshakable foundations of the former patriarchal way of life. It is in front of him that Gaev delivers his fiery speech to the century-old cabinet. And it is Firs who not only closes, as it should be according to the play, but also opens the play. At the beginning, he slowly sorts out the cloaks of all the inhabitants of the estate hanging on a chair: he carefully shakes off the dust from some and carries them in his arms like a child, he crumples the others in disgust and throws them into a corner, expressing his attitude towards each of the heroes of the play. But all of them, loved or despised, for him, as, probably, for the director, are idiots - clumsy, unhappy people who have not coped with life.

In the finale, all the heroes of the play, except for the forgotten Firs, hide in the back of the stage behind a palisade of windmills and, putting on paper hare ears, doomedly tremble while shots rumble over the stage. This scene continues another episode of the play, when Varya and Anya, together with Charlotte (this work of Irina Apeksimova cannot be called successful), play out a comic scene at a house party "suddenly the hunter runs out." Then the "bunnies" fell as if knocked down for fun. In the end, there is no doubt that they are all truly doomed. During the entire six hours that the performance has been going on, short and sad, like a distant echo, musical phrases sound above the stage, as if pre-burial of all the guests of this celebration of life.

It is impossible to enumerate the director's finds and metaphors of this performance. But gradually one gets the impression that they all exist, as it were, separately from the acting. Experienced stage masters, like obedient students, diligently follow the director's instructions - they jump on one leg, roll on the floor, rush around the stage and hit the ground with a flourish, but, it seems, they do not quite understand why all this is necessary. The mood and aroma so necessary in Chekhov's performances did not appear in this "Cherry Orchard". The Russian actors and the Lithuanian director agreed, but the alchemical reaction that makes the performance animated did not happen between them.

Newstime, July 11, 2003

Alexander Sokolyansky

Play it clear

A great performance was born in Moscow

The words "greatness" and "genius" have been devalued so that their former dignity will not return to them. Calling pop stars, businessmen and gangsters great has long been shameful, but the coup de grace ("blow of mercy" with which they finish off the vanquished) was caused by advertising: recently a poster caught my eye praising something that "brilliantly washes your linen" . And yet: "The Cherry Orchard" directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus is a great performance, which happens once or twice a decade. Yevgeny Mironov in the third act plays Lopakhin brilliantly.

That, in fact, is all that needs to be said on the merits. Theatrical upheavals are too rare and precious to indulge in the professional joys of analysis right off the bat. I would like to keep the feeling of silent languor and delight longer, when the tongue is rough, and the eyes get wet at the mere recollection of what happened. Here it is, then, what it is - catharsis, the happiness of compassion, clearing all the channels of spiritual life, the highest award of the viewer. No, this is not a reward, nothing can deserve this, this is a gift. Lord, bless Your servant Eugene - what he does, what he puts into his work, from what hiding places he gets out and how he spends rapturously: he will become exhausted if You do not support him.

Eymuntas Nyakroshus did the impossible: he abolished cultural memory. We know nothing more about the death of the estate culture, about the historical and what else there is doom, about the guilt of non-resistance to the future. About delicacy, which not only borders on lack of will (Kuprin on Chekhov), but is fraught with disgusting arrogance, when those with whom you have just been delicate leave, and you can relax. “Ham,” the flabby Gaev (Vladimir Ilyin) says shortly about Lopakhin, who had just offered to save everyone (offered confusedly, almost feverishly, by no means businesslike) and, looking at his watch, sped away. Blinded, or something, this lover of lollipops, billiards and eloquence, found someone to call. Ham himself. It is also necessary to pinch the sister's daughter (even if not her own, adopted) in passing - poor Varya, roughened and mangled by constant floundering around the house. A stooped back, a man's gait, an almost caricature-like sharpness and overstretching are completely uncharacteristic of the actress Inga Strelkova-Oboldina in life, which is why they are brilliant, which is why her heroine is sorry to tears. It’s a pity, however, for everyone, even Yasha (Anton Kukushkin) - young, curly-haired, completely stunned by Paris and the benefits of a lackey life under the unlucky, littering last money, half-mad Ranevskaya (Lyudmila Maksakova). And this empty-headed bastard reproaches Varya as a "fiance" (the same Lopakhin); the kid, trying his best to be “civilized”, hits the sickest one: move away, you stink. Civilization in a lackey way is a terrible abomination, but the naive Yasha tries sincerely, not realizing what a bastard he will be. There is no need to despise him like that, and you can’t call your sister vicious behind her back: this, they say, is felt in every movement. It may be true, but it is not the whole truth, and so it is impossible.

Sorry I got lost. He began to remember, and that was it: he dragged the performance along with him. Nyakroshus is not only strong and powerful, he owns the highest secrets of theatrical coupling: he braids so tightly that all the scenes, all the circumstances of life grow into each other. Amazing clarity and integrity of vision, when in the general, fluid picture of the world there is not a single random detail and very few vague, dissolved by time. Almost every little thing is in focus, it can be considered separately, but it exists in direct and necessary connection with a hundred other vital little things. So, according to the statements of physicists and theologians, the world looks like from eternity - with the difference that God counts not in hundreds, but in billions. The famous stage characters of Nyakroshyus - the director's gestures that can be "read", but which need to be enjoyed, like Japanese calligraphy - are, in fact, points of rest and relaxation, and not self-sufficient metaphors. The connection of everything with everything should not be a constant experience: the thought freezes, the brain needs to be rebooted, otherwise it will go crazy.

I talked about the fact that in Nyakroshus Chekhov's characters do not know anything about their future and the energy of their ignorance is communicated to the audience: everything is happening for the first time, right now. The ability to turn a previously known plot into an incident, the absolute concentration on the present time, which only animals get for free, is the highest of directorial skills. When the organizers of the happenings and filmmakers from Dogma refused to write the scripts, it was a kind of capitulation: we made the plot, but it does not come to life, which means to hell with the plot; not us, loved ones, to send to him. You don’t need to send anyone anywhere, but you need to admire those who know how: only they turn out to be great.

It is customary to say that in the theater the present tense alone exists; it is not customary to say that it exists like paper money: not backed by the director's personal gold reserves, it becomes little more than a dummy - misfortune and ruin. Not everyone has gold, but Nyakroshus has plenty and pure gold.

He can afford to talk not about the fate of the Cherry Orchard, but about his life and human choice. It's not clear - well, I can't say it clearer yet. The Cherry Orchard in this performance is a dense growth of small plywood windmills at the back: there is no wind, and they look in every direction. They look like toy airplanes, and in side white light they look like a cluster of signs that, perhaps, do not mean anything. The passer-by from the second act will pretend that he is reading from them: "My brother, suffering brother ...", but this is a lie, he does not read anything. Two rings hang above the stage - like gymnastic rings or a little more; in the first act there is blue plastic inside them, before the fourth act a cane is attached to the right one. I don’t know who came up with it, the artist Nadezhda Gultyaeva or Nyakroshyus himself, but they look just like the frame of a giant broken pince-nez. Is it possible to say that Nyakroshyus refuses to see the world in Chekhov's way? Let the one who knows how it is - "in Chekhov's" answer.

It is absolutely necessary to describe what and how Maksakov, Strelkov-Oboldin, Ilyin, Alexei Petrenko (Firs) and especially, especially Evgeny Mironov, do in the performance, and this should not be done in a newspaper. Here - only about the meaning, in its ultimate generalization. “The Cherry Orchard” by Nyakroshyus is, first of all, the tragedy of Lopakhin, who, having acquired “an estate, more beautiful than which there is nothing in the world”, for the first time heard (not with his ears) the terrible gospel question: What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?(Mt:16, 26). You can’t return anything - you can’t even give money to Petya Trofimov (Igor Gordin), even give everyone a bottle of suspicious champagne for eight rubles, and that doesn’t work. Lopakhin is completely crushed, but others are not much better: joylessly spitting, not to say stronger, such beauty is a sin, albeit involuntary, but almost mortal.

After Lopakhin - Mironov - all despair, and such despair that cannot, cannot be shared - at the end of the third act will order: "Music, play clearly!" : at first timid, then gaining strength, berserk, deafening.

We did not notice that they were silent, but we know for sure that we will never hear them again.

The Cherry Orchard now runs for about six hours, with three intermissions. If before the autumn shows it will be cut, I beg the initiator of the project and producer Zeynab Seyid-Zade: please, if possible, let it be played for some more time as it is now. Nyakroshus, of course, will not spoil anything, he does not know how, but perhaps the audience that turns everything in the world into a fashionable spectacle will find that such length is too exhausting for it. Then the performance will bring together more worthy people: not consumers, but employees. That would be good. Let this work be properly strengthened: there is nothing more important in our theater now.

NG, July 11, 2003

Grigory Zaslavsky

Above love

"The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshus and the International Stanislavsky Foundation

The premiere of "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshus, which was played in Moscow last night, is not yet a premiere. The real one will happen in September. At the dress rehearsal, where friends and the theater community were invited, the audience was warned that the performance was intended for the big stage and that Nyakroshus would return in the fall to re-release the premiere, they say, already on the stage of the Taganka Actors' Association. But for now - every evening, from July 10 to July 15 - "The Cherry Orchard" can be seen on the recently opened, but still for its direct - theatrical - purpose, unused stage of the STD Cultural Center on Strastnoy.

For the public - a test. Six and a half hours! Chekhov's four acts are separated by three intermissions, during which a visit to the buffet is not fun, but an urgent necessity.

At first, I did not believe in the very possibility of this, but then the performance dragged on and I did not feel any delay: The Cherry Orchard goes on almost as long as it should have. Igor Yasulovich, Pavel Khomsky, Anatoly Adoskin, the actors of the Mossovet Theatre, the Vakhtangov Theatre, the Youth Theater sat like diligent students.

The theater project, in which the International Stanislavsky Foundation and the Meno Fortas Theater in Vilnius are involved, do not want to be called an entreprise, since it is customary for us to define hack work with this word. However, this is, of course, an enterprise, if we keep in mind the principle of organization, when the director recruits a troupe of actors from different theaters and puts on a performance, trying to make this difference not particularly felt.

The Cherry Orchard, which is important, is Nyakroshyus' first work in his "theatrical" homeland. He studied at GITIS, they love him in Moscow, but he has never worked with Russian actors until now.

The first thing you notice is the redundancy of actors. In his performances, Nyakroshus often entrusted the game to two or three, while the rest seemed to play technical roles. Here, almost everyone is famous (and it may seem that, agreeing to a modest role, he hoped for more, and sometimes tries to play more than necessary).

Lyudmila Maksakova, Vladimir Ilyin, Alexey Petrenko, Irina Apeksimova…

You can't tell right away whether the performance was good or bad. It is not customary to talk about the performances of Nyakroshyus in such categories.

It seems that you will undertake to enumerate Chekhov's characters, and it will turn out that half of the performance is not there. Actors come out, say something, but what they want to say is not clear. There is no Charlotte, it is not clear what Nyakroshyus has Firs, Yasha, Epikhodov, it is not clear why the director needed another girl, who is almost constantly on stage.

And next to it - several wonderfully played roles: Varya (Inga Strelkova-Oboldina), Anya (student of the Shchukin School Yulia Marchenko), several very strong scenes from Ranevskaya - Lyudmila Maksakova and - Lopakhin, an outstanding work by Evgeny Mironov. One could admire his ability to lead a role in the television marathon "The Idiot", but it is much more difficult to "endure" almost the same thing in the theater. Mironov has a very delicate, complex work (they say that Nyakroshus even asked to leave this subtlety, to play harder, rougher).

Nyakroshus treats Chekhov's play as a mystery, with a story that is most fully and accurately described with the help of simple ancient images, so that each character in him probably corresponds to some particular archetype. He is looking for some ritual, primitive "explanations" for everything. In the second act, when Lopakhin tries to light a fire, the match goes out, and he does not have another one, without thinking for a minute, he grabs two stones and begins to strike a "primitive" spark. The ball in the third act is more like Nyakroshyus's medieval carnival, where they roll on the floor and jump on one leg.

It can also be said that the performance is built on the principle of a labyrinth, where there are many dead ends, where each next metaphor or image deployed in space does not promise a connection with the previous one, does not become the key to previously introduced ciphers and will say almost nothing about the future.

Nyakroshyus wins back almost every Chekhovian word, trying to find a metaphorical equivalent for each. At the same time, he often becomes a pioneer, noticing in a "hackneyed", filthy text that he had not heard before. For example, Varya, looking for her sister (which Petya explains by the fear of leaving them alone with Anya), is seriously alarmed. While Anya enjoys the revolutionary monologues of the eternal student, Varya runs to the river, jumps in one place, looking around, as in her memory there is an unhealed wound from the death of her brother who drowned in the river.

Buying a garden, Lopakhin recalls that his grandfather and father were serfs here. Tells and knocks - somewhere on the floor. It is as if one enters the space of an ancient, ventilated world, where one can reach out to the grandfather and father, who should know that their son and grandson bought a cherry orchard. And they seem to hear Lopakhin, because in response to his blows, a dull drum echo is heard. And into this knock, at first quietly and then louder and more unbearably bursts the chirping of birds. Lopakhin hides from everyone in his coat, bends down, and leaves. Thus ends the third act.

In this performance, Lopakhin from the very beginning is embarrassed, even ashamed to offer the "exit" known to him. It is worth the effort, the exertion of strength to pronounce these words: "And we must cut down the old cherry orchard."

Other finds are more like tricks (especially since Charlotte's tricks as such are not in the play).

Gaev, wearing an artist's beret, fumbles for a long time with a torn Parisian telegram and finally throws him backstage. There is a clinking of glass, a roar, and from the other side a cloud of dust flies onto the stage. Here it is a century-old wardrobe! If we talk about sweets, then immediately there are handfuls, a handful - Anya, a handful - Varya. Shoulder straps are made up of candy wrappers for Gaev, sweets are thrown into the hall. Gaev's words "I am a man of the 80s" cause a friendly laugh - the chronological reference now reminds of the talkative years of perestroika.

The performance of Nyakroshus is beautiful in retelling. Suffice it to recall how Anya, when the garden has already been sold, warms her mittens with her breath and puts them on the hands of the chilled Ranevskaya. She, preparing for a new life, tries on Petya's glasses.

Going out to meet the Parisian guests, Varya gathers a large crowd, and, huddled at the door, with their backs to the hall, the family begins to wave their arms, and in this crowd are those who meet and those who have arrived. Ranevskaya, on the other hand, rises to the stage from the side, takes a banquette, pulls it into the middle, lies down, and Firs puts a roller under her head. The nursery is a place where it's cozy, you can lie down and curl up: "Now I'm like a little one!" She lies, and the inhabitants of the house pass by her, whom she will have to recognize (Dunyasha awkwardly lays flowers, as if in front of her is not the living Ranevskaya, but only the body that they do not meet, but see off on their last journey).

Silent scenes in Maksakova are stronger than those in which it is necessary to scream with a hoot. Than when you have to break, interrupt the state you have just found: talking about "her sins", she lies down on the stage, but immediately jumps up to put the chairs on one side, one at a time. Lopakhin listens to her, lowering his peasant hands, accustomed to simple labor. He listens and kisses her, kneeling down, and then lies down just like her, in the same direction.

Something remains incomprehensible. Something is impossible to accept. It is impossible to imagine, for example, that Petya, pulling himself up on the rings, could brush aside Ranevskaya's words with his feet (and even kick her in the chest). It is physiologically unpleasant to watch Firs sneezing profusely right at Ranevskaya, who, in order to look into his face, creeps up and looks in - is she sleeping on the go?

By the way, Nyakroshus, one might say, removes this tragic motive: in the finale, Firs simply slowly sits down and hides behind a chair, because of which he also slowly got up at the beginning of the performance.

The house is not hammered, it is blown up. In our time, such an exit, of course, is more natural. Not axes knock, but dull explosions.

Nobody is leaving. Only after moving to the edge of the stage do they put on funny rabbit ears. Bunnies are also something from childhood.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta, July 11, 2003

Alena Karas

Six hours of fainting

The great Lithuanian Eymuntas Nyakroshyus staged "The Cherry Orchard" with Russian artists

EYMUNTAS Nyakroshus composed perhaps the most desperate performance in his entire life. At least that's what we thought after watching it. And one wants to write about it not by calculating and pondering, but almost automatically, in order to preserve in the intermittent intonation of the text the insane and insane language of the theatrical composition of the Lithuanian genius.

In the play, which the author himself called "a comedy, sometimes even a farce," the director heard a continuous, desperate cry. A shock that lasts six hours. Anything can be said about it, except that it is a harmonious artistic creation full of transparent clarity. The cold and ruthless "Uncle Vanya", brought to Moscow in the early 80s, was the crown of a balanced consciousness in comparison with the last Chekhov performance, in which everything is hysteria and anguish. The bright flashes of theatrical fantasies that pervade all Nyakroszyusov's performances subside here to give space to desperate pain and hopelessness, arranged by Mahler's music in minimalist arrangements by the Lithuanian composer Mindaugas Urbaitis.

Only in the first act, when three girls - Varya, Anya (nervous, thin, actress Yulia Marchenko, new to Moscow) and Dunyasha - like three sisters or three sorceresses - cackle and scream in three voices, taking water into the larynx, will a deceptive feeling appear fun. And in response to their cackling, the garden bird will chirp, and the girls will rejoice at this quick response of the Garden and their easy penetration into its mysterious life. Unfortunately, in the cramped club space of the STD Cultural Center, where the premiere was played, the winds did not fly, the fires did not burn - just as the elements so important for Nyakroshus did not have time, they could not heal in the crampedness of the new cultural office of the Russian capital. Stones and billiard balls flew into the hall every now and then, the actors clearly did not have enough space to run away - after all, it is from this simple muscular energy that Nyakroshus often extracts the bitter salt of his artistic land.

Lopakhin - Evgeny Mironov - an incredibly charming figure. Tight, fragile, young and shy, he washes himself while waiting for the train and, dipping his palms into the basin, lightly sprinkles into the hall, as if sprinkling it with living water. With this magical act, he is clearly trying to overcome the inevitability of fate, which will be more and more severe and demanding of his wards. But is it possible to change fate when the harsh, crazy and tender bird Varya - the fantastic role of Inga Oboldina - keeps running and screaming, inviting misfortune. Her Varia is a true clown, skipping from love to Lopakhin to love to God. The passion with which Inga plays Varya makes her the first actress of this terrible and crazy performance. She cuts the small stage with her hunched, shriveled body. There is more truth in her eccentric hopping about being single as a woman than in all the feminist treatises put together. The life between God and the horror of existence so ingrained into her body that it turned her into the Clown of God, into the one who, like a shaman, cuts through the space of the Garden with huge unfeminine steps in order to keep it from death with her last strength. Their farewell at the very end of many hours of theatrical vigil is one of the most poignant theatrical miracles. Mironov, sitting at the very forefront, gives her the last desperate tears.

Nyakroshus builds the final act as a series of incredible encounters and revelations. The penultimate one - the farewell of Yasha (Anton Kukushkin plays the poor afterborn of the dying traditional world) and Dunyasha (sharp, funny and comic Anna Yanovskaya, Youth Theater) - overturns all the usual ideas about the secondary characters of The Cherry Orchard: "Do you know how to love?" - Dunya's question is addressed to the very heart of the poor lackey, who does not know, but discovers this feeling in himself on the very threshold of the end. For the first time, the footman who has come to his senses with some incredible seriousness looks into his very heart.

In a completely different and separate way, I want to talk about the eccentric and extremely Russian character of Gaev, as he is shown in the game of Vladimir Ilyin. Eccentric and completely insane appears here Lyudmila Maksakova in the role of Ranevskaya. Nyakroshyus, a true macho, despises Petya, a pitiful and unsubstantiated predictor of future changes, someone who can neither love nor live (Tuz actor Igor Gordin did not play brightly here, but exactly in relation to the director's intention). Ranevskaya-Maksakova with the nervousness of her appearance corresponds to the director's intention, her performance both irritates and attracts at the same time. Just like Nyakroshus' performance itself, painful, unpleasant and mesmerizing with the horror of a total catastrophe. And only grains of the last, dying changes illuminate this total horror with a gentle light of hope. Alexey Petrenko - Firs is supposed to bring tears to the audience. But it doesn't call yet.

Perhaps it will become easier when the performance moves to the big stage. Which one is not yet known. This should happen at the end of September. In the meantime, all viewers of the "Garden" will have a 6-hour tachycardia in a small cramped hall of the STD Cultural Center on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Rodnaya gazeta, July 11, 2003

Vera Maksimova

Running after Chekhov, from Chekhov?..

The last Moscow theatrical sensation took place when the season was already over, the theaters had left, some were on tour, and most were just on vacation because of the heat.

The performance staged by the famous and highly respected in Russia and Europe Lithuanian director Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, who continues or completes (after "Uncle Vanya" and "Three Sisters") his Chekhov cycle of the last of the great plays of our theatrical genius - "The Cherry Orchard" ”, but not with his own, but with Russian artists, which had never happened before in the life of Nyakroshus.

The rehearsals continued for two and a half months in Vilnius and Moscow, they were of an extreme, enthusiastic nature: they went from eleven o'clock in the morning until the evening, behind closed doors. The line-up of performers, the constellation of names - Lyudmila Maksakova (Ranevskaya), Alexei Petrenko (Firs), Evgeny Mironov (Lopakhin), Vladimir Ilyin (Gaev) - was intriguing ... The incredible duration of the performance was also intriguing - 6 hours with three intermissions.

Relations with the administration of the Stanislavsky Foundation and the STD Cultural Center, on the stage of which the new Cherry Orchard is staged, are spoiled for many theater fans. There are many more people who want to get to the performance than there are tickets. The time for lengthy reviews will come (if it does) in the fall. In the meantime - the first impressions, expected and unexpected in the new "Cherry Orchard".

Nyakroshyus, who has always worked in an ensemble of actors close to himself from his own theater "Meno Fortas", is recognizable in the conditions of an enterprise, a combined, "flying" cast of performers. He builds a spectacle like a chain of metaphors, attractions, gags. Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" by a Lithuanian director is full of dynamics and movement. After young Anya, almost the entire younger generation of the old house runs after her toy hare - Dunyasha, Yasha, Varya, Epikhodov, Petya, the dumb maid, and even two; a strange (added to the performance) guy in a bright pink shirt with a large iron bell on his chest, close to Lopakhin, to whom the owner throws a coin after he shows “horned-butted goat” with his fingers and bellows like a cow. Varya and Anya, Varya and Dunyasha run racing along the ramp. Charlotte back and forth, deep into the stage and to its edge, rapidly rolls a baby carriage, catching up or sitting under it, does not allow the stroller to break into the hall. Yasha, frightened by Epikhodov's revolver, hangs on gymnastic rings above the stage and yells from a height: "Save me!" In the episode of the quarrel with Ranevskaya, student Petya hangs on the rings and fights off her feet. Something is constantly being dragged and moved. A large and heavy fragment of a staircase, on which they not only walk, on which they sit, but also hammer something into it.

In a word, there are many physical actions, signs, dynamic metaphors. Some of them are exquisite and touching, like the one in which, after the sale of the cherry orchard, Ranevskaya's hands freeze and her daughter Anya pulls white children's mittens over her mother's unbending palms. Magnificent, like the one in which Lopakhin, who returned from the auction, bought the estate, with a knock on the floor, as if calling the serf ancestors to witness his triumph. And the underground is the earth, the graves answer it with dull cosmic blows. Before the end, before leaving the estate, packages wrapped in white paper are brought onto the stage. The clumsy Epikhodov destroys one of them. The paper is torn and wrinkled, and then it is clear that there is nothing inside. Emptiness. The inhabitants of the house will take with them only air.

But some metaphors and actions cannot be deciphered. “Fired up” by Anya’s toy hare, which she takes out in the first act and, leaning her cheek against it, sleeps standing up - the “hare element” invades the performance. All have long paper ears and half-hare masks. Charlotte has not a dog, but a hare in her bosom. Chasing around the stage - like hares after hares. And in the finale, boarded up in the house, abandoned Firs takes out freshly cut grass, scatters it on the floor and begins to chew. And we are already thinking not about the tragedy of the old man, but why does he eat grass - is it not a hare himself? Or is it a total return of the characters to the world of childhood?

The tone of communication, the actor's vocabulary - raised to a scream, to hysteria, which in a small hall and a small stage is deafening and tiring. Finding himself in the unaccustomed conditions of the Russian troupe, the director is excessive in his concern not to be like everyone else, not to repeat anyone. Attractions are weakly interconnected, sometimes arise from a random word, and sometimes at the arbitrariness of the director, which is why the action stops, the rhythm is sluggish and time seems exaggerated, unfilled. Relying on movement and physical action is excessive. Violated one of the strongest in Lyudmila Maksakova - Ranevskaya's scene of confession of sins, where she repents, is executed, plays a little sinfulness (it's not for nothing that Lopakhin applauds her) and suddenly, interrupting herself, rises from the floor, only to overturn the blue summer cottages on the stage chairs.

There are many things that hinder an actor. To date, the actors are the main difficulty of the sensational performance. At the level of a great artistic event, in a new way for himself and for Chekhov, Evgeny Mironov Lopakhin played. Quite young, charming, kind, talented, sincerely willing to help, but already bearing the torment of early remorse and guilt. The most masculine, adult, masculine, and not youthful and adolescent role played by Mironov. Talented in the image of Varya, piercingly sincere and free in transitions from comic to suffering, Varya is Inga Oboldina.

Lyudmila Maksakova has the best - quiet scenes and silence. The first, wonderfully written for her by the director, when her family is waiting for her at the back of the stage, and she walks behind them along the ramp, dragging a black couch behind her like a coffin, and exhaustedly fits on it. No longer a living woman, but living out the last moments of her life. The silent episode is remarkable, where she looks, not recognizing, at Petya, but sees her dead son, daydreams. Verbal scenes, moments of extreme sounds, alas, are often unmusical and rude. However, this is a problem for most performers.

Some of the most important roles (Epikhodov - Ivan Agapov, lackey Yasha - Anton Kukushkin) were not played at all. Not "finished", not brought to a climax Firs - Alexei Petrenko - just a majestic ruin. Part of the roles - whether in a hurry, whether unprepared - is not decided by the director. For example, Charlotte is Irina Apeksimova, who doesn't even have tricks. Igor Gordin plays Petya Trofimov in a rudely social, newspaper-feuilleton manner, with a cobblestone in his hand - as if "a cobblestone is a tool of the proletariat."

However, it may be premature to talk about actors today, as well as about a little tangible ensemble. The performance is just beginning, it will grow. We'll live until autumn - we'll see what happens.

Izvestia, July 11, 2003

Marina Davydova

Cherry nursery nightingale garden

Moscow theater season closes

The Russian theater community has doubts about whether Bob Wilson, Christophe Marthaler or Frank Castorf are really great directors. The public is ready to discuss the question of how grandiose (or, on the contrary, insignificant) the talent of Lev Dodin, Kama Ginkas or Anatoly Vasiliev. This same public doubts just in case everything and everyone. But about Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, a complete consensus has been reached in its ranks. Nyakroshus is a genius. All authors are obedient to him. He is on friendly terms with Pushkin and Shakespeare. His aesthetic is a melting pot in which everything alien becomes one's own. Now, thanks to the Stanislavsky Foundation, the Cherry Orchard and Russian artists have fallen into this cauldron at once.

The main problem of the project, as it seemed, was how "ours" (especially the star "ours") would be able to master "his" system. The one in which it is foolish to pull the blanket over yourself, since by definition - and completely - it has already been pulled over to the side of the director. This "acting" problem, on closer examination, turned out to be far-fetched. The notorious pairing of the Russian psychological school with the Lithuanian metaphorical theater did not happen, but on the small and not very suitable stage of the STD Theater and Cultural Center for Nyakroshus, where The Cherry Orchard was spread out for the duration of rehearsals and five premiere performances, all "ours" fit into the turns of Nyakroshyus's aesthetics no worse than the Lithuanians. Remelted.

The real problem happened with another, namely with the text of the textbook play, to which the gloomy Baltic genius - apparently, reverence for the author's homeland nevertheless affected - was extremely careful. This gave the performance (and it goes - neither more nor less - six hours with pennies) wordiness that is completely uncharacteristic for Nyakroshus. We have seen long performances by this director before. So wordy - never.

And in "Hamlet", and in "Macbeth", and in "Little Tragedies" he used the plot only as a canvas, on which you can embroider your own - whimsical, magical, amazing - pattern. He mercilessly shortened the text and cut off the characters he did not need. He staged a play based on the play. The Cherry Orchard is a performance based on a play. His heroes - a unique case for Nyakroshus - say everything they are supposed to say. On the stage, meanwhile, what happens is what is supposed to happen: metaphors crush psychology, any object that enters the mirror of the stage immediately acquires a plurality of meanings, and so on. and so on. Should I explain to you. Some of the notions - which is typical - clearly demonstrate to the audience the fatigue of Chekhov's text. At the very beginning of the performance, Lopakhin (Yevgeny Mironov) reads his lines, peering intently at the tome, which Dunyash holds in outstretched hands. Later, Petya Trofimov (Igor Gordin) will argue with Lopakhin himself in a similar way, responding to each remark with a remark from the book. The words of the masterpiece are frayed and worn out, but they are still pronounced. Whole, almost uncut.

The performance, saturated to the limit, in which there are genuine revelations, and cute notions, and indecipherable escapades, is, to put it mildly, not good. The logic of the theatrical text and the logic of the dramatic text do not always coincide. It is still strange that after parting with the garden, which in the system of this performance is, of course, parting with life, the magically rich Simeonov-Pishchik (Sergey Pinegin) appears on the stage as if nothing had happened, distributing money to his patient creditors. According to the internal logic of the production, this scene, like many others, should be ruthlessly blacked out, but it is being played. Just because it's written. All this weighs down, I would even say, litters the "Garden". Gives some scenes an illustrative character that was previously uncharacteristic of Nyakroshus. Even though it was cleverly invented: telling Anya and Varya about his projects, Gaev (Vladimir Ilyin), a funny operetta-looking blooper in a beret on his side, takes out a handful of sweets in candy wrappers, neatly divides them into three piles, and all three begin to gobble up the delicacy on both cheeks. Who here does not remember Gay's phrase: "I ate a fortune on candy." The abundance of such illustrations only hinders reading the main plot. Or rather, stories.

The heroes of this "Cherry Orchard" live in a disturbing and mysterious world. They see dangers everywhere (and sometimes indeed lie in wait).
This garden is a reserved space that only a madman would try to buy or sell. This garden is like a zone in which a stalker never appeared. Already in the very first scene, Firs (Aleksey Petrenko), monotonously removing the coats of the inhabitants of the house from the chair and brushing them off with a broom, suddenly takes the belt for a snake and beats it with all his might. Then he sees: it's not a snake at all - and calmly ties the belt around his waist. Sometimes the dangers become overtly farcical. Jealous of Dunyasha for Yasha, Epikhodov takes out a revolver and not only frightens everyone with suicide, but fires from it at a heart-rendingly screaming opponent. Of course, he misses - twenty-two misfortunes. Then the bullets will whistle more than once over the heads of the characters, but who pulls the trigger now - God knows. The inhabitants of the estate are defenseless before life, like small children, and therefore the cherry orchard often seems to be a talentedly invented kindergarten, in which they play hide-and-seek, then catch up, and sensing danger - any, including a harmless, in general, passerby - join hands and become in a circle. The heroes do the same when Lopakhin announces the purchase of a cherry orchard. So, in childhood, they stop being friends with those who did not play by the rules. This Lopakhin, in an excellent performance by Yevgeny Mironov, is at first a freak, a reasoner, and Manilov is cleaner than any Gaev, closer to the finale, some kind of sexless, subtle, petty demon. What a man he is. Or a man's son. Are men like that?

In addition to the children's motive in the play, there is another, quite unexpected. I would call it "animal". In addition to the snake, there are many more to be found here. For example, a cow. She is depicted by a servant dressed in a red shirt with a bell, led by Lopakhin. Or pet birds. Before Ranevskaya's arrival, Varya (Inga Oboldina) drives them all into a flock, like geese, and Ranevskaya herself (Lyudmila Maksakova), after drinking coffee, suddenly begins to wipe her face like a cat's muzzle. But the main animals in this performance are bunnies. Charlotte, showing tricks, will shoot two of them as a joke - Varya and Anya in disguise, and Firs, before delivering his last monologue, will enter the stage with an armful of hay and begin to chew it in front of the amazed audience. Following him, all the other characters will also turn into defenseless animals, put on white ears and hide behind the lattice moved to the backdrop, closer to the white paper spinners decorating the backdrop. Animals - to toys. It is above them, darlings, that the bullets will whistle in the finale. How dangerous this world is, look-and-and...

Needless to say, in "The Cherry Orchard" by Nyakroshus, besides the named motives, a cart and a small cart were invented. Some of the ideas are grandiose. Here is something I will never forget.

The very beginning of the performance. Households are waiting for Ranevskaya, turning their backs to the audience, to the theatrical backdrop in front. They stand, smoke cigarettes, conjure the arrival of the lady. And she, with a white face in a romantic dress with swallows flying across a white field, suddenly appears from a completely different side, from behind the curtains, drags a sofa behind her, puts it on the proscenium and lies down to face us. She came here not from Paris, but from oblivion. And now they are trying to bring her back to her past life. "Do you remember which room this is?" Anya asks her. Could ask: "Do you remember your name?"

Toward the end of the first act, Anya, Varya and Dunyasha, fooling around, gargle with water. The answer to this is suddenly the singing of birds (this is not only a cherry and children's garden, but also a nightingale garden). Beautiful Twitter will respond fantastically and frighteningly later in the scene where Lopakhin announces that he, and no one else, bought the cherished estate. Yevgeny Mironov comes to the very edge of the stage, looks into the hall with scary, wide-open eyes and shouts sacramental: "Music, play!" In response, a deafening, stunning, soul-tearing singing of nightingales is heard.

And I will never forget the dance-macabre at the beginning of the third act (this is how children dance, suddenly knowing the horror of being), Ranevskaya, holding a handkerchief in her teeth, on which tears flow, and dejected Firs, sitting alone on the roof ma-a-a- scarlet house. I don't understand what it means - this house, but it will stick in my memory forever.

And if you ask me: is this performance worth cutting down more, putting it together harder, or rather building it up - I will answer: yes, of course. If you ask: is it worth it in order to see a few real Nyakroshyus scenes (did you experience that sweet aching feeling in the theater when you suddenly clearly understand that something inexplicably beautiful is about to happen, and it - on you! - really happens?), spit on time and fatigue, gather your will into a fist and sit in a stuffy hall for six hours in a row, I will answer: it’s still worth it. I have a hunch that moments like this are worth living for.

MK, July 11, 2003

Marina Raikina

The Cherry Orchard is a zoo

Chekhov lacked only grandfather Mazai

The Cherry Orchard, a noisy and hyped theatrical project of the Stanislavsky Foundation and the Meno Fortas Theater, has finally been sold in Moscow. The act of sale and purchase, followed by woodworking work of Russian-Lithuanian production, dragged on for a whole day, or more precisely, for 6 hours and 15 minutes.

Chekhov was played on a new site, little adapted for theatrical work, although it is located in a new center under the patronage of the Union of Theater Workers - small, with windows through which, despite the blinds, light breaks treacherously into the hall. In addition, it is almost without backstage, so that the audience of the first rows can clearly see how the artists are getting ready for the exit, adjusting their clothes, hairstyles, and you can also watch the props and strong fitters. Such openness is not a trick, but forced, unpretentious conditions in which the organizers of the project have placed, or rather, set up both artists and spectators.

But even this can be experienced, given that the performance was produced by such a master as Eymuntas Nyakroshus from Lithuania. For him, this is the third Chekhov play after "Uncle Vanya" and "Three Sisters". But "Cherry" turned out to be the most risky: for the first time, he launched Russian actors into his Lithuanian garden, for which a multi-stage casting was arranged. As a result, the Lithuanian enterprise was replenished with stars - Yevgeny Mironov, Lyudmila Maksakova, Vladimir Ilyin, Irina Apeksimova and other more or less well-known artists. How the aesthetics of the individual farm economy has grown together with the field of the Russian element, the audience watched over the course of four full-fledged acts with three intermissions.

The point is not at all that on the stage they fell impossibly a lot, mostly from a running start, fell into a heap, spat abundantly in the direction of each other or rushed in a crowd from backstage to backstage. The point is not that Ranevskaya (Lyudmila Maksakova) pronounces her tragic monologue in the second act while lying on paper and interrupts it only to knock down a chair in order to settle down again with a pure heart on a packet of paper at the very edge of the stage. And the fact that the associative figurativeness of the artist Nyakroshyus' transcendental fantasy, which makes all his performances special, in The Cherry Orchard turned out to be inorganic and unnatural.

Mise-en-scène with the question “why?” there were far more than clean and clear. Why is Lopakhin running around Ranevskaya with a stick and pounding the stage? Why does the eternal student Petya Trofimov (Igor Gordin) utter his frivolous speeches about a new life, huddling like a dog under the stairs? Why does Firs (Aleksey Petrenko) need a Georgian cap, and poor thing Charlotte (Irina Apeksimova) does the director’s idea force all the time to fall with a run-up with a roar and the risk of fractures?

With such a synthetic congestion, the concept of the "Garden" is transparent, like the budget of an office in which there is nothing to steal. The director's frank dislike for the owners of the garden in the first and second acts grew into open contempt for them in the third. The ball in the house of Ranevskaya looks like a ball of physical deformities, obviously, which have become such as a result of moral deformity. Under funeral music, mainly percussion instruments, pairs of crookedly, twisted, twisted and unnaturally twisted, move from the back to the proscenium, disperse, as in a mazurka, in order to reunite and continue their pathological movement.

When looking at the dances of the degenerates, Nyakroshus' "The Cherry Orchard" can be considered an anti-Russian performance. But to the same extent it can be considered pro-Russian in terms of solving the image of Lopakhin. The representative of the new class is pure in face, deeds and thoughts. He sings in front of Ranevskaya a cappella about the dove, and this is perhaps the best place in the whole performance and the best way to convey the love of the uncouth peasant Yermolai for the noblewoman Ranevskaya. However, it is just as hard to believe in Lopakhin's uncouthness as in Gaev's capacity and activity (Vladimir Ilyin). Mironov - neat, well-groomed, beautifully wears a jacket and suit of a Tyrolean hunter. He is sincerely upset when Ranevskaya and Gaev, like little children, are capricious about selling land for summer cottages. Two adult peanuts, whom he paternally embraces, just do not let bubbles in their material obstinacy.

Yevgeny Mironov leads the given pattern of the role very cleanly and accurately, not stepping aside from the school of psychological theater, in which today he may be the best artist. But, based on the work of the entire ensemble, it is not completely clear whether director Nyakroshyus loaded the artist Mironov with those formal elements that are the trademark of his theater. Or left him a black sheep in form, as well as in content?

All other roles are fully loaded by the master, but the artists cope with his formal requirements in different ways. Some diligently try to get used to his complex plastic drawing, others are not able to do this, and still others, the most independent and self-sufficient in the theater, sluggishly sabotage what they do not understand. For example, to freeze on the proscenium, strongly, squeezing the face to bulging eyes, and remain in an absurd pose.

So far, Inga Oboldina's work in the role of Varya can be considered successfully combining form with an inner beginning. She sweepingly cuts circles around the stage, pounding the floor with a cloth rag and thereby expressing her hard-working, patient character. And for all the outward rudeness, emphasized by a bent back, lowered arms and even a bang to the bridge of the nose, it remains both funny and touching to tears, especially in scenes with Lopakhin. Other artists, for some reason, diligently preserve the style of their theaters - Satire, Lenkom, Vakhtangov, Youth Theater, which only speaks in favor of these famous troupes. Their aesthetics, which at times turns into clichés, seem to be able to eat into even actor's clothes. In general, something did not grow together in this garden on the Lithuanian-Russian border.

The performance has two finals: one is human, the other is animal. In the first, Lopakhin admits to Ranevskaya that he bought the garden. He reports timidly, embarrassed by his own act, but in the course of the monologue he gradually becomes filled with dignity. In contrast with him is the motionless face of Ranevskaya, who cannot burst into tears because of a gag in her mouth. Laconic and very effective scene.

And, finally, at the seventh hour of the action, everyone turned into ... bunnies with white ears, which were put on children's Christmas trees from the times of the USSR (a white paper headband with a pair of paper ears). Trembling under the shots that have haunted mankind since time immemorial, they watch Firs, who, like a doomed herbivore, eats green onions without hands - and the hare Ranevskaya with the hares Anya and Varya, and the hare Lopakhin, and the ridiculous hare Epikhodov (Ivan Agapov), and other hare tribe. In the zoo named after Nyakroshus there are neither shameful wolf-dogs, nor old Mazai. Humanity is unlikely to be saved by anyone. Not everyone admits to himself that he is a trembling creature, with or without rights, but the director insistently reminded the audience of this.

And there are sweet moments in this garden. Gaev, as you know, having eaten his life on candy, sitting on the floor between his nieces, gives them sweets, and they shoot them into the hall. Gets the first rows. But it would be better - money. By the way, about money - tickets for the "Cherry Orchard" sell for three thousand.

Newspaper .Ru, July 10, 2003

Dina Goder

Shoot, exhausted from love

The premiere of "The Cherry Orchard" directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus - miracles of seduction, bird chirping, dead hares and unexpected roles.

Few people believed that this would really happen: that the Lithuanian genius himself would still decide, would not give a last-minute compensation and would release a performance in Moscow with capital artists. Apparently, the need in recent years to work with tough Western contracts made Eymuntas Nyakroshyus come to terms with the fact that once given consent and the set deadline are unshakable. Otherwise, we know the story of how he refused to release the almost completely finished Carmen, which is still legendary in Vilnius, or how long he hesitated, but still did not allow himself to be persuaded to stage Hamlet with Oleg Menshikov.

I must say this time the International Stanislavsky Foundation, having decided on the triple centenary of the play, its production at the Moscow Art Theater and the death of Chekhov, on such a project, put into play all the reserves of seduction.

He sent a representative delegation to Vilnius for persuasion, headed by Lyudmila Maksakova herself, Alexei Bartoshevich, a Shakespeare scholar especially respected by Nyakroshyus, and another famous theater critic, and at the same time the director's fellow countryman Vidas Silyunas. He promised freedom in everything: the choice of actors, production team and terms of work. And he made it possible for the first twenty days to rehearse in Vilnius, thereby depriving the Moscow stars of the opportunity to be distracted.

Moscow rehearsals went on for 45 days in the new STD RF cultural center, and five premiere performances are also planned to be shown there, which is why the center is now considered the general sponsor of the project carried out by the Stanislavsky Foundation and the Menofortas Nyakroshius Theater, which provided the production team. The main money for this expensive project, as it turned out, was allocated by the Moscow government under the Open Stage program, and this fact causes great bewilderment. The Open Stage program, as far as I know, was conceived to support new, experimental theater and young, independent groups that have no other way to find a stage and express themselves.

Obviously, with professional production, it was quite possible to find third-party, sponsorship money for a project in which a star of world directing and the most famous artists of Moscow participate, and not break a “children's piggy bank” for this.

Since, no matter how much Nyakroshyus, who loves Moscow, where he once studied, cuts his fee, it is clear that the Cherry Orchard ate money from the Open Stage budget, which could have been used by several modest experimental groups to carry out their projects. However, this is all politics. Therefore, I'd rather talk about The Cherry Orchard.

Nyakroshus' performance was incredibly long: it comes with three intermissions and lasts more than six hours, which is not so easy to endure in the small stuffy hall of the Cultural Center. Surprisingly, time here not only does not shrink compared to the real one, as is usually the case in the theater, but even stretches. At the beginning of the fourth act, Lopakhin says that exactly 47 minutes are left before the train and in twenty minutes we have to go to the station, but we know that the characters will not leave home for another hour, while the action lasts.

Or maybe they just hopelessly miss the train.

However, it is known that at first all Nyakroshyusov's performances last for many hours, but under pressure from the producers, he eventually has to shorten them so that the audience has time at least for the last buses. That is why it is commonly believed that Nyakroshus does not like words and always cuts plays. But so far, at the pre-premiere screening, Chekhov's text was absolutely intact.

So far, there is a lot of mystery in this performance, not fully manifested, tense, and it is clear that the performance will still change. Those who are older notice in it an echo of the "Cherry Orchard" by Efros, which Nyakroshus loved very much. Thus, the performance at Taganka, where the action took place in a cemetery, and Vysotsky played Lopakhin. Yevgeny Mironov plays for Nyakroshus Lopakhin, he plays well, and it is clear that he will play even better. For the first time for himself, he tries to be not a neurasthenic boy, but a real man - with a large and sharp gesture, stability, confidence and pressure. All this turns out, but the same tenderness and anxiety remain in his eyes, and it is clear that this dissonance will give a lot to the performance in the future. Another wonderful character is Gaev (Vladimir Ilyin) - homely, soft, good-natured, funny and organic, like a dog.

When, at the end of the heavy conversations of the first act, he sits his nieces around him on the floor, dumps a bunch of sweets out of his pockets in front of them and starts the old home games - with candy shot and sticking candy wrappers on his forehead - the hall simply fills with delight.

You can talk about the artists and what Nyakroshus invented for which of them. About the strange Ranevskaya - Maksakova, who was once so killed by the death of her youngest son that her mind was shaken and now, at moments of especially strong shocks, she becomes unwell: she either falls into a stupor and does not recognize anyone, then lies on the floor or runs around the room, trying to put her to bed. -own people and objects. About Firs - Alexei Petrenko - the only guardian of the spirit of the old house, frightening everyone like a huge ghost. About the completely unexpected Petya - Igor Gordin - not a shabby, beautiful-hearted student, but a very quick-tempered young man, probably ready to plant anyone in the forehead from complexes, without waiting for an attack or resentment. About Anya herself - the charming Yulia Marchenko, unknown to me, similar to the Lithuanian heroines of Nyakroshyus' performances: long, thin, and naive and foolish in her youth. About the stooped, manly Varya - Inga Oboldina, who smiles towards Lopakhin with such hope and readiness for love that only longing takes from understanding that this is unrealizable.

In The Cherry Orchard, which is usually staged as a story about a ruined noble nest, this time there is an incredible amount of love, so much that it is she, or rather her impossibility, that turns out to be the main theme of Nyakroshus' performance.

Ranevskaya is mortally in love with her lover left in Paris, Lopakhin is exhausted from love for her, Varya dreams of Lopakhin, both the ridiculous bald-headed Epikhodov and the funny curly-haired Yasha are in love with Dunyasha, and she herself cannot figure out who she likes more. Petya loves Anya, it seems to be Charlotte, and Simeonov-Pishchik looks at her with delight ... And after all, no one can hope for an answer, even Petya and Anya, whose love seems mutual, but they are both so afraid to frighten each other, to do something superfluous, that they also probably do not have a common future.

However, in this "The Cherry Orchard" so many things have been invented and there is so little, unlike the previous performances by Nyakroshusov, of any single centrifugal force that gathers everything into a tight ball, that we can talk about a variety of themes and plots, the sound of which either arises or breaks in those six hours. Each of the spectators will tell his story, like the blind, feeling the elephant. Although, of course, no one will forget the final scene of the return from the auction, when Lopakhin shouts: “Music, play clearly! Let everything be as I wish! And instead of music in the garden, birds chirp sounds, louder and louder, reaching such a deafening chorus that it’s time to run.

And Nyakroshus himself, probably in order not to torment the viewer, who is trying to collect all the amazing fragments into a whole picture, throws him a very simple and straightforward metaphor. Hunting for hares. "Hares" are scattered throughout the performance: either the girls, under the guidance of Charlotte, will play a home performance about poor bunnies who "went out for a walk", or they run around with a fluffy toy hare. And in the finale, all the heroes lined up in the background of the stage, watching the groaning of the abandoned Firs from behind the forest of weathervanes, put on paper hare ears, and then the shots begin to rumble. Under this rumble, the curtain closes.

Of course, it’s a pity for harmless bunnies, but still I would like that by September, when the performance will be restored for showing on the big stage of Gubenkov’s Taganka, Nyakroshyus decided to refuse this simple hint. We better think for ourselves.

Russian courier, July 11, 2003

Elena Yampolskaya

Agony Hotel (four stars)

The most pretentious performance of the season was played - "The Cherry Orchard" directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus

The Cherry Orchard is a co-production of the Meno Fortas Theater (Vilnius) and the Stanislavsky Foundation (Moscow). The project was started for the centenary of Chekhov's last play, the casting was held in Moscow a year ago, last spring rehearsals were held in Vilnius, and then - for 45 days - in the newly built STD RF Cultural Center on Strastnoy Boulevard. The premiere was also released here. There have been no tickets for the first four shows for a long time, but in the autumn the Cherry Orchard will return and, most likely, will change the venue: what's the point of pickling a performance in a hall for two hundred people that thousands will want to see? It is also possible that by September the "Garden" will decrease somewhat in volume; its current running time is nearly six hours.

The spectacle, created by the great Lithuanian director with Russian actors and based on the most Russian play in the world, for some reason reminded me of a Thanksgiving turkey stuffed so tightly that a) it is about to crack itself, and b) there is hardly a stomach capable of digest this meal. To say that Nyakroshus made the performance rich and sophisticated is to be very modest. Director's fantasy climbs from the "Cherry Orchard" over the edge. In the first act it is admirable, in the second it is alarming, in the third it is tiring, in the fourth it does not bother at all. I speak only for myself: there were people who were ready to sit in the hall for the same amount of time, and there were those who seriously thought about dumping already in the first of three intermissions.

When the Moscow Art Theater first opened The Cherry Orchard to the public, one reviewer remarked that the play "raised a monument over the grave of pretty white-handed women." Nyakroshus completely fit into the funeral tradition - it seems that the very air of the performance is saturated with decay. The music of Mindaugas Urbaitis from the very first scene sounds like a requiem (the strings whine lingeringly, the wind instruments thump gloomily); Ranevskaya, who arrived, immediately lays down on a black hearse; all her toilets are marked with the sign of a diving black swallow (vaguely reminiscent of the Moscow Art Theater curtain); Firs clutches Leonid Andreevich's coat to himself, like the body of a drowned boy; Lopakhin resoundingly beats on the ground, so that the father and grandfather "get up from the coffins and look at the whole incident"; a party on the day of the auction, August 22 (a feast during the plague), gives rise to a natural question - do they bury the brownie, or give the witch in marriage; and in the same place, at a home holiday, Anya, Varya and Charlotte show an amateur pantomime about a cruel hunter and two hares dying in terrible convulsions. In the finale, everyone, including Lopakhin, will put on paper ears, and a series of firing volleys will remind the viewer that in fourteen years not only the former owners of the cherry orchard will be destroyed, but also its new owner. Here, however, the blasphemous phrase “About hares, Senya, this is not relevant” comes to mind, because Lopakhins have revived in our country and I would really like to see, finally, “The Cherry Orchard”, staged from the point of view of Yermolai Alekseevich. Could he have done otherwise? Did he have a way out? The tragedy of this image is not inferior to Boris Godunov... Lithuania, however, is experiencing an invasion of the Ranevs and Gaevs, demanding back their estates - there are other problems.

In the first act "The Cherry Orchard" Nyakroshus conquers immediately - primarily with its unrecognizability. Amazing feeling: I have never read or seen this thing before. In the plot, familiar along, across and by heart, an intrigue suddenly appeared. Not a single word is said in passing, every little thing is justified and meaningful. However, the further the performance becomes, the more mannered it becomes: they won’t say a word in simplicity, each replica is preceded by a separate director’s move, and the plastic drawing of roles and mise-en-scenes is so complex, as if it were not a dramatic action, but modern dance. An attempt to combine naturalness with algebraic calculation gives a strange effect of a bad dream: everyone is a little puppet, a little zombie, as if people, but at the same time shadows, freaks of curiosity, ghosts, playing out the story of their agony in the afterlife.
In "The Cherry Orchard" by Nyakroshus there is no gradual transition from carelessness to fever - tachycardia begins from the first scene. The drum stubbornly knocks the heart out of rhythm. A restless, uncomfortable, nervous performance about impulsive, noisy, even demon-possessed people who are entirely composed of sharp corners and crooked lines. The actors make wild jumps, run around in circles, beat the stage with sticks so that the chips fly, and yell furiously, spitting on each other from head to toe. In general, uncontrolled salivation is a big problem in the Russian theater. We have to do something about it. Looks extremely unhygienic.

Nyakroshyus took four stars in The Cherry Orchard: Lyudmila Maksakova (Ranevskaya), Evgeny Mironov (Lopakhin), Alexei Petrenko (Firs) and Vladimir Ilyin (Gaev). By a strange coincidence, the performance as a whole also turned out to be four-star. On "Marriott" and "Hyatt" does not pull. Although, as we have said, it meets the all-inclusive system. And it smells of sulfur, and steam comes out of the mouth (matinee, a frost of three degrees), and Firs is girded with a whip that no one needs (gone are the days when they flogged at the stable), and the girls gargle their throats, and the nightingale from the garden responds to the gurgling, and when Lopakhin demands: “Music, play!”, he is answered by a terrible, piercing, unbearable whistling for the human ear ...

All the stars are not bad, but I personally liked Ilyin the most - no one in our country better than him reincarnates as meaningful alcoholics. A picturesque artistic beret suits him like a gilded mustache to a Behemoth cat. Funny, charming and, as always, accurate. By the way, Ilyin was the only one who received applause in the course of the action. For nothing special - Gaev just sat, stretching out his legs, treating his nieces with caramels ...

Now regarding Firs. Dear Alexei Petrenko, to put it mildly, is an overly powerful old man. It is difficult to sympathize with him: such a Firs, tensing up a little, will calmly drop a boarded-up door with his shoulder ...

Lyudmila Maksakova is beautiful, but not as Ranevskaya, but as Arkadina. Too much acting.

As for Mironov, his Lopakhin, it seemed to me, is similar to Vladimir Putin. Everyone is afraid, but it’s not clear what he intimidated, where the strength came from. Mystic. Quiet in appearance, nervous in depth, quick-tempered, probably vindictive. The handkerchief is folded in a rustic way, in an envelope. Able to be touched with half a turn. But crying - crying, but doing the job. When he offers to cut down the cherry orchard, even his fists turn white. And in the hall sits and listens to Lopakhin, a summer resident who has multiplied to extraordinary ...

Mironov's face, utterly simple and spiritualized in its simplicity, did not, for my taste, suit Prince Myshkin, but it was simply perfect for the role of Lopakhin. By the way, this Yermolai, in all likelihood, will marry Varya. He doesn't see the point in not getting married. Take it easy.

Varya - Inga Strelkova-Oboldina struck me. You have to love Nyakroshyus very much and be devoted to the profession to the marrow of your bones in order to turn with such desperate determination into a stooped, stocky, awkward creature, boringly cut, terribly - as if from a clothing market - dressed and manish so much that you willy-nilly suspect in this Vara an unconventional orientation.

It is worth going beyond the "four plus" team (stars and Oboldin), as the center of gravity shifts in the performance. Other characters resemble anyone but themselves. The eccentric dandelion Dunyash (Anna Yanovskaya) with chemically perhydrol fluff around her head, with grimaces and grimaces, almost uninterrupted, seems to replace Charlotte. Whereas Irina Apeksimova has no data for Charlotte, except for a low voice and a flexible figure. Yasha, lanky, curly-haired, stretched out on gymnastic rings, like a tobacco chicken, absurdly surpasses Epikhodov. Anya (Yulia Marchenko) squeals, rushes around the stage and is good only in the first act, when thin, young, in a delicate nightgown she herself resembles a flowering tree ... In addition, for the first time I noticed that it was Anya who affirmatively declares that Firs was taken away in hospital. Such a trusting girl? Or - do not give a damn about anyone except yourself and Petya?

The role of Petya Trofimov is generally a major misfortune in an actor's biography. The pathos of a poor student made sense only once, in 1904, and since then "All Russia is our garden!" and the like sounded either like Soviet agitation or outright mockery. For fifteen years now, it has been customary to laugh at Petya out loud. In Nyakroshus and Igor Gordin, he is bilious, vicious, in places disgusting. Enfant Terribl, deserving of a good flogging (at the stable or not - it doesn't matter). He kicks Ranevskaya and slaps her ass with a flourish.

The Cherry Orchard was designed by Nyakroshyus' wife, artist Nadezhda Gultyaeva. Mangy pillars of the entrance gate, wretched furniture (the only front chair is kept under a cover in case the lady arrives), dry prickly branches like a hut - a blank for a fire. Everyone was waiting for a flame to flare up from a spark, but alas. Focus failed.
The costumes are boring. Only Firs has a cap of immense size, a typical Georgian "airfield", which amazes and amuses the eye.

The result of a long viewing: "The Cherry Orchard" is not the best performance of Nyakroshus, but the time was not lost in vain. The result of a lengthy review is the same. Go to the Cherry Orchard and don't die on it if you can. Enough deaths on stage.

New news, July 10

Polina Bogdanova

Lopakhin time

"The Cherry Orchard" by A. Chekhov was staged by the Lithuanian director E. Nyakroshus

The well-known Lithuanian director E. Nyakroshyus staged a six-hour play based on A. Chekhov's Cherry Orchard. The best Moscow actors are involved in the performance - Yevgeny Mironov, Lyudmila Maksakova, Alexei Petrenko, Inga Oboldina. This production became an event in the theatrical world.

Once upon a time, Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" was staged as an anthem for the intelligentsia. It was in Soviet times, when they saw themselves in Chekhov's intellectuals, who were stuffy and cramped in the Brezhnev regime. And although the directors tried many times to “soften” Lopakhin, he, one way or another, acted as the guilty one. Now his time has come.

Nyakroshus pushed Lopakhin forward and sang a hymn to a man who knows how to ride history, a realist and a pragmatist. However, Lopakhin, performed by E. Mironov, does not give the impression of a soulless person, occupied only with the economy and the accumulation of money. He is very gentle, almost in love with Ranevskaya and wants to help her out of the difficult situation in which she finds herself. He keeps saying all the time - give land for summer cottages, do as I say. But in vain. Ranevskaya L. Maksakova does not hear or understand him. And he doesn't let up. Sharply, almost screaming - "this is the only way out." And he turns out to be right.

The moment of his triumph is coming. Ermolai Lopakhin buys an old house and estate, the most beautiful of which in the entire district. The house where his grandfather and father were not allowed to go further than the front. Lopakhin rejoices. He is excited, he is happy. And some kind of sharp sound is heard, which is getting stronger and stronger, reaching an incredible volume, from which it lays the ears.

What about the rest? They suffer, solve their love and other problems, have fun. They don't hear reality. They don't think about anything. And if they think about it, like Petya Trofimov (I. Gordin), who talks about Russia all the time, then it looks comical and absurd.

Gaev (V. Ilyin) is soft-bodied and unrealistic. Varya (I. Oboldina) is hopelessly in love with Lopakhin. Dunyasha (A. Yanovskaya) is also in love and suffers from a humiliating relationship with Yasha. Anya (Yu. Marchenko) is passionate about Petya, but she will probably die with him, because he has no masculine qualities. There is also old Firs (A. Petrenko) in his big ridiculous cap, a mushroom that looks like a huge mushroom, which is firmly rooted in the soil of the house. But his relationship has already dwindled over time. He is trampling on the threshold of death.

In the house of Ranevskaya there is constant hubbub and confusion. A lot of people. Everyone is having fun. And somehow Charlotte starts a game of hunter and hares. Anya and Varya put funny bunny ears on their heads, which are on children's Christmas trees. And Charlotte takes a long stick and starts aiming at them. They jump and she aims. And then they drop dead. One, then another.

In the same bunny ears, all the characters of the play will appear in the very finale. They will line up in the back of the stage. And they will rattle. They are all hares, who will be shot sooner or later.

Chekhov can be put in different ways. There was a period when it was interpreted this way and that, often contrary to the author's meaning. The reading of Nyakroshyus is as close as possible to the play itself, which Chekhov wrote as a comedy. And, of course, I saw in Lopakhin not that new rude owner who cuts down a beautiful cherry orchard with an ax. But a man of action, standing firmly on the ground.

MN time, July 10, 2003

Irina Korneeva

Garden, garden, garden...

The premiere of "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshus took place at the STD Theater Center

It was almost unbelievable. Eimuntas Nyakroshus received many offers to stage something with us someday. I even dreamed of "Hamlet" with Oleg Menshikov.

But the famous Lithuanian director has never, since his studies at GITIS, staged anything with Russian actors. Not the language, or, as he says, language, barrier interfered. It just didn't happen.

Nyakroshus did not refuse the International Stanislavsky Foundation, which came to it with a proposal for the 100th anniversary of the creation of the play "The Cherry Orchard" and the 140th anniversary of the birth of Stanislavsky, to make a joint project of the Lithuanian theater Meno Fortas and the foundation and stage Chekhov with Russian actors, Nyakroshyus did not refuse. Why? "The time was right. And I said: okay. Sooner or later, I would have started doing The Cherry Orchard anyway," he explained succinctly.

He is generally laconic. He speaks very slowly and very little. His favorite answer to most questions concerning concepts, plans and prospects: "I don't know yet. I'll see. There is time. I'm not in a hurry. I'm calm." (With great Mkhatov pauses.)

This is his first production of The Cherry Orchard; Nyakroshyus has already staged other plays by Chekhov. We rehearsed "The Cherry Orchard" for 15 days in Lithuania and 45 days in Moscow. There were no "table talks" prior to going on stage. The performance was already born in the head of the director - usually, before sitting down to the text, he goes through hundreds of options, gets acquainted with all known productions, so as not to fall into the same points. Decisions do not give rise to work as they work: "It is too late to decide something as work progresses ... If there are no ideas, data, the rehearsal will not go well. Everything is worked out in advance."

His mise-en-scenes are built literally by millimeters. The actors are chosen - as if they were born for these roles, even if, when reading the program, many of the names opposite Chekhov's characters will surprise you greatly.

For three days in Moscow, Eymuntas Nyakroshyus held a casting behind a tightly closed door. The lists were prepared in advance and tamped down in the international Stanislavsky fund. But all the same, from the applicants for Var, An, the Trofimovs and the Epikhodovs, the line was formed, as in the entrance exams to theater universities, only from famous actors. He asked to bring more young people. For three days I watched famous artists. Of course, they did not read any poems and fables to him. There were no intellectual conversations. They just talked. About what? "I wanted to assemble the cast in which there would be a very good climate. Creative. This is enough for the first cycles, then we will watch .... For me, the main thing is human qualities. Talent is in second place. The distance that needs to be run in the time of the performance, not only joyful. There are also holes. And they need to be passed without panicking. In the theater, calmness is necessary. "

Casting passed: Lyudmila Maksakova, surprisingly freed from her trademark Vakhtangov clichés and playing Ranevskaya, like Russian directors, has not played anything for a long time. Alexei Petrenko, after a long break, returned to the stage in the costume of Firs - a huge man, perhaps the wisest in this whole story. Yevgeny Mironov, who conveyed all the pain of Lopakhin so superbly that this character was forever justified. Vladimir Ilyin - Gaev. Yulia Marchenko - Anya, Inga Strelkova-Oboldina - Varya, Irina Apeksimova - Charlotte, Anna Yanovskaya - Dunyasha...

"I'm from the sixties," said Nyakroshyus. "Then there was no such aggression as now. People were kinder, happier. I come from that time." People from his performance seem to be from an imaginary time. Emotionally intense to the limit. In which they live with bare nerves, but with the openness and sincerity of just infants. Close to hysteria. Sensing trouble a mile away and unable to do anything. Well, absolutely nothing."

The tragedy in the performance is felt from the very first bars of the first act, which is usually bright and sunny. The maid Dunyasha puts flowers on the chest of Ranevskaya, who lay down to rest, like a dead woman. For a long time, the family tries on how to bring Ranevskaya on the children's couch into the house - with their feet forward or backward, and it is difficult to get back. The feeling of misfortune is terrible. Primal doom. They run from problems and troubles - they literally run, circling around the stage and choking on their monologues. They reach the brink of despair. They climb with their problems at the most inopportune moment - and when will it be more suitable?

The music of Mindaugas Urbaitis sounds "as simple as everyday human life". Two or three musical phrases stick in my memory, as if scorched with a red-hot iron. The scenery of Nadezhda Gultyaeva is also from the category of artistic minimalism: chairs tied in a circle, two gymnastic rings, dry branches for a fire, some kind of log, a table, chairs ... (Very convenient to carry on tour).

Evaluating the work of Nyakroshyus and Urbaitis, which lasts six and a half hours, is even somehow embarrassing. Yes, the first act does not go - it flies in one breath, and you suffer and cry as if the cherry orchard has already, firstly, been sold and cut down, and, secondly, this garden is not Ranevskaya, but your own, personal. Yes, in the second act the rhythm changes, and you get used to it for a long time and try on: is anxiety in everything - is it from the approaching end of the world or from something else? Yes, in the third, everything is on the verge of insanity, and you are with everyone, and the fourth act goes on like life itself, in fragments and jerks. But is it possible to judge whether people live badly or well, even on stage. Playing about how people love their past. And about how everyone is, in fact, alone. What the poor, what the rich. What Vari, what Ani. That the Ranevskys, that the Lopakhins. They are all useless...

Vedomosti, July 14, 2003

Oleg Zintsov

Place on earth

Eymuntas Nyakroshyus presented the Cherry Orchard to Moscow

Of course, it is necessary to say that The Cherry Orchard is the main premiere of the season, that this is the first performance that Eymuntas Nyakroshyus staged with Russian actors; be sure to thank the Stanislavsky Foundation, which organized all this - but first of all, and as calmly as possible, I must say that Nyakroshus gave Moscow a great performance: other epithets are possible and necessary, but one cannot do without it.

You have to be prepared for the fact that The Cherry Orchard runs for six hours (with three intermissions), that this is a performance that requires mental work from the viewer, that you have to live it, not watch it - and at times it is almost physically hard. But there is, of course, in the "Cherry Orchard" and air, and light, and moments of happiness. So far, there is not enough space on the stage of the STD theater center: it is clear that the performance needs a large stage - and in the fall, according to the producers' plans, "The Cherry Orchard" will start playing on a more suitable venue. They say that the performance will be further reduced by an hour or even two. This may be reasonable, but the problem is that in its current form, The Cherry Orchard is rhythmically perfect. If in the first two acts it still seems that some scenes can be shortened, shortened, then in the third one you understand: this is the only way to bring us to this grandiose climax - an episode of such energy and power that Evgeny Mironov, playing Lopakhin, becomes scary; how he can withstand these thousands of volts, God knows.

I'm not at all sure that "The Cherry Orchard" can be somehow clearly and accurately explained: it's about something, but this metaphor should be understood in this way. Eymuntas Nyakroshyus created a garden of forking paths; some of them are extremely confusing, others lead to a dead end, and you need to travel through all at once. With a six-hour duration, the performance is incredibly rich and dynamic. Chekhov's text seems to be preserved in its entirety, but it is dissolved not so much in the famous metaphors of Nyakroshyus, but simply in physical actions: there is a lot of running, falling, shooting, performing tricks. But all this fuss only emphasizes the deadness of the background and the general doom - not in the sense that the garden will be sold and everyone will be unhappy or die, but that nothing and no one can be saved at all.

Actually, there is no garden. There is some kind of conditional lattice, studded either with small weather vanes sticking out in different directions, or with children's toys (artist - Nadezhda Gultyaeva). A pair of gymnastic rings hangs from above. There are two more shabby square columns that look like gates or tombstones. In the first act, in front of them, with their backs to the audience, all the characters will crowd, they will wave their hands, smoke - meet Ranevskaya (Lyudmila Maksakova), and in the meantime she will quietly come to the fore, dragging a black couch behind her, then lie down on it, as if trying on coffin; Anya (Yulia Marchenko) would throw flowers from above, immediately come to her senses, take them away, but when the mistress of the estate is carried on the couch through the gate, the porters hesitate at the entrance: is it head first or better with feet? Ranevskaya in the play seems to have been living in the realm of the dead for a long time, but she just can’t meet her youngest child there, drowned in the river, a child - that’s why she rushes from prostration to hysteria.

Lopakhin will also remember his dead - when he knocks on the floor, referring to his father and grandfather: you were serfs on this estate, and I bought it. And the ancestors will answer with a deaf underground knock.

Lopakhin in this performance is a man of Protestant ethics based on respect for work. It is also important that we are talking about labor on the land in which his ancestors lie. That is why there are so many archaic and symbolic gestures in Yevgeny Mironov's game, and that is why the break in the connection of times, suddenly experienced in a completely Hamletian way, is so terrible for Lopakhin. The sound of a broken string is not only heard in the score of Mindaugas Urbaitis, but is also shown - by a broken chain of a round dance: all the characters were about to hold hands, but then something rumbled so that the hands unclenched themselves in fright.

Although the Hamlet motif of "The Cherry Orchard" is one of those paths that lead to a dead end. You can probably say that Ranevskaya behaves with Lopakhin like Gertrude with Hamlet, but why this is not entirely clear. And there is also Varya (the excellent role of Inga Strelkova-Oboldina), who looks at Lopakhin with devoted dog eyes and hears in response: "Okhmeliya, go to the monastery." Yes, she herself would have gone there - stooped from work, pious and fussy, always in black, with sharp male gestures - she would have left long ago if it were not for Lopakhin: in the fourth act, Mironov and Strelkov-Oboldina play the parting scene as if it were farewell Vershinin and Masha from "Three Sisters". There is already something redundant in the appeal of "Okhmeliya" and the whole Hamlet theme, as if Eymuntas Nyakroshyus wanted to once again emphasize that Lopakhin for him is a figure of an absolutely tragic scale.

So it is: Evgeny Mironov after this role is the best Russian actor. The third act of The Cherry Orchard - when Lopakhin announces the purchase of the estate - Mironov plays as a moment of tragic choice and completely ruthless epiphany. Having bought the most beautiful garden in the world (which is not on stage because it is some kind of absolute, metaphysical value), he committed a sin that can no longer be forgiven, and heard his verdict: the third act ends with a sound much more terrible than a broken string - growing, like the howl of a siren, the singing of birds, merged into one unbearable, ear-cutting high note.

There is one oddity in Nyakroshus' performance, probably very important, but just as difficult to explain: almost all the characters in it are likened to some kind of animal. Most of all, hares - in the final, everyone turns into them: they put white paper ears on their heads and frightenedly hide behind toy weather vanes under the roar of shots. About hares, let's say, it's understandable, but there are things more mysterious: Ranevskaya, for example, wipes her face like a cat, and Firs (Aleksey Petrenko) chews hay thoughtfully. I do not undertake to unravel these persistent animal parallels, but in the story of the fall told to us, they strangely remind of innocence - and, therefore, of the properties of the garden from which Chekhov's heroes were expelled by Nyakroshus.

Evening Moscow, July 11, 2003

Natalia Zimyanina

"The Cherry Orchard": guts on the reel

It's done! Two incompatible concepts combined legal marriage. Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, a Lithuanian of Moscow training, staged the play "The Cherry Orchard" with Russian actors, whom he had previously avoided.

A new interpretation of Chekhov was expected as the last proof of the fact that directing is a serious matter, and not a semi-amateurish one. That the culture of the theater of the Russian school is still glimmering in the work of not only Fomenko.

Snickering at the Chekhov International Festival (closing of the 12th), critics and theatergoers cheered up and rushed to storm the small hall of the new Theater Center of the Union of Theater Workers, as if they had not been stuffed with delights from Donnellan and Sturua, Saarinen and Langhoff, Suzuki and Marthaler, Chinese opera and the horses of Bartabas.

Now in order. The Cherry Orchard project of the K. S. Stanislavsky Foundation and the Meno Fortas Theater (the author of the idea and producer - Zeynab Said-zade) really worthy - chic, one might say - opened a new Theater Center at the corner of Strastnoy Boulevard and Bolshaya Dmitrovka, in which, because of its delicious location in the very center of the city, as there were terrible rumors, only baths and massage parlors for new Russians would settle.

Now there is confidence that the project of the Moscow government "Open Stage" really got a decent (albeit only 400 seats) platform, where any obvious talent who does not have his "own" theater can operate.

"The Cherry Orchard" in the work of the great (the definition has long been tested) Nyakroshus - for the first time. His "Uncle Vanya" and "Three Sisters" were brought to Moscow and rather irritated the public. And "The Cherry Orchard" turned out to be not without hairpins against the Russians (it's scary to say how the Lithuanians still treat us). But we perceive it differently.

The most disgusting character here, no matter how ridiculous, is Petya Trofimov - a tactless bore who declares common truths; a screaming parody of a Russian intellectual. Handsome Igor Gordin (known in glossy magazines as the husband of Yulia Menshova) has been turned into a character as if from O.S.P. studios. Stupid demagogue, useless person, impotent besides. The last, perhaps, is the most serious attack by Nyakroshyus against the Russians. No one was outraged - let it go! The director did not feel sorry for the poor hero Gordin, even purely physically: Petya so many times, as if with an invisible hand, was thrown onto the stage with a roar, they knocked loudly on his head - in order to hear that he was a blockhead.

Almost the entire composition of the "Garden" is stellar. The Russian entreprise was chosen carefully by the gloomy and impregnable Nyakroshus. She was taken to Vilnius, where, according to Said-Zade, "the actors tried to get into the style of the performance," and then rehearsed for 45 days at the STD Center.

They thoroughly penetrated the style: The Cherry Orchard runs for more than 6 hours, not counting three intermissions! The stage text here is much richer than the verbal one. All these comings and goings, jogging and throwing, round dances, almost a ballet. Psychological pantomimes (wordless dialogues) and conditional ones ("Caprichos" from Nyakroshyus) give the actors not only to turn around, but simply squeeze them out like a lemon. How you can play this all week (8th to 14th in fact) daily is a mystery.

Lyudmila Maksakova (Ranevskaya) works brilliantly, even with her face like a ghost. Varya (Inga Oboldina) is a real Quasimodo of the cherry orchard. Gaev with his senseless sweets - perhaps the best role of Vladimir Ilyin. "Western" Charlotte (Irina Apeksimova) is like an infernal "foreign body" from an American blockbuster. Yes, grumbling Firs, of course (Aleksey Petrenko), where would it be without him - in the finale, forgotten, he chews grass.

Lopakhin is a separate line, because Lopakhin here is today's number one artist Yevgeny Mironov. Honestly, the only character you really empathize with.

However, on the whole, Nyakroshyus is not the kind of person who will mourn "The Cherry Orchard" with feeling. Remember from Knyshev: "Do not rush to throw away the old tattered sofa. Throw it away slowly, with pleasure" (I quote from memory). So Nyakroshyus decides the fate of the cherry orchard with a rational, thick relish for the idea, winding your guts on a coil for six hours. So that by the end the spirit is already out.

From September the performance will be transferred to the big stage (perhaps to the Mossovet Theatre). Who dares - dial, excuse the naturalism, more sandwiches. Chekhov will forgive you.

Newspaper, July 14, 2003

Artur Solomonov

The cherry orchard was cut down for love

Eymuntas Nyakroshyus choreographed Chekhov

This year there were two significant anniversaries for theatrical Russia. Exactly one hundred years ago, Anton Chekhov put an end to the play "The Cherry Orchard" and gave it to the Moscow Art Theater. And yet, one hundred and forty years have passed since the birth of one of the founders of the Moscow Art Theater - K.S. Stanislavsky. The Stanislavsky Foundation celebrated the anniversary of the play and Konstantin Sergeevich as follows: they invited the brilliant Lithuanian Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, adored by the Moscow public and critics, to stage The Cherry Orchard. The performance lasts six hours - three for each anniversary.

There is nothing more hackneyed by our directors than Chekhov's plays, and the most long-suffering of them is The Cherry Orchard. From the stage they repeated so many times: “All Russia is our garden”, that you are waiting for this phrase in the next production with longing. But when in Nyakroshus' performance Igor Gordin, turning sharply, shouts this phrase in a stupid voice, the audience laughs. In general, the audience laughs quite often, and at the performance of Nyakroshyus you understand that The Cherry Orchard can be called a comedy. As well as tragedy. And a reason to meditate.

Many are accustomed to solving Nyakroshyus' performances as a charade. If some kind of glass appears, it is no accident, and if it also breaks, then metaphysical and psychoanalytic conclusions can be drawn from this. But this performance bears the stamp of simplicity, which, if desired, can be called “unheard of”. The difficulty of perception can only lie in the unusual length of the production. And that the meaning of individual episodes and images is understandable and interesting, and it is not easy to answer the traditional question “what is the performance about”. But there are options. And there are amazing scenes in the play.

It seems that Ranevskaya (Lyudmila Maksakova) cannot appear in a different way: everyone gathered in a bunch, waiting, and she comes out from a completely different direction, dragging either a black couch, or a semblance of a coffin, lies down on it and impassively begins to accept expressions joy. And it seems that Ranevskaya's grief, when the cherry orchard is sold, cannot be expressed otherwise: in complete silence, quietly whistling something and looking straight ahead, she climbs her hands up an invisible ladder. Or calling a bird.

And Varya (Inga Oboldina-Strelkova) cannot be otherwise: always ready to be offended, suffering without love, she seems to be trying to sweep those who annoy her out of the house, trying to attract Lopakhin (Evgeny Mironov), realizing all the hopelessness of this. In the main character, Yevgeny Mironov is similar to Varya. They are, as they say, "unloved". Only once Ranevskaya pat Lopakhin on the head. Perhaps this will be the only time Lopakhin smiles so openly.

You are immersed in the performance, as if under water. The deeper, the more bizarre this world. But you won't get out anymore. Of course, not everyone can withstand six hours of diving. The performance is for the most persistent. The stunning stream of images that Moscow saw in, say, Hamlet is not here. For me, this performance is close to the production of The Joy of Spring, which Nyakroshus showed in St. Petersburg last autumn.

The main character was spring, its arrival. Her perception by people, their joy. A human flock, meeting spring, wandered around the stage, ran, hugged, parted. The pack is cruel, simple-hearted, ridiculously dressed. In The Cherry Orchard, the same human flock rushes around the stage, then dances, then crumbles. But they do not meet spring. However, it is felt that people here obey and resist a certain force that cannot be described in one word without reproaching themselves with vulgarity. It seems that Nyakroshus is not interested in “characters”, but in what affects them. What makes someone, despite everything, not react in any way to the loss of a cherry orchard, someone - to buy it, someone - to pretend to be a Frenchman, someone - to be an eternal student, despising this image for a long time; which prevents two people who love each other from even talking about it. There will always be particulars, stupidities, deeds that drown out the possibility of talking about the main thing and take these people to where for some reason they should be. And the closer the final of the performance, the more often the thought arises that people are generally superfluous creatures. Mote in the eye of God.

All the so-called "bells and whistles" are very precise in relation to the play and are based on this accuracy. Here the chirping of birds, at first quiet, becomes incredibly loud. How much metaphysics can be attached to this chatter! But the source is exactly the same: the birds living in this garden will surely leave their nests, and their alarm is conveyed in this chirping. And when the viewer is again deafened by the sounds of the forest being devoured by flames, and Lopakhin is trying to drown out these sounds with frantic blows of the stick on the ground - the “root” of this image is more than understandable. The image of a blazing garden.

But when these images are layered one on top of the other, they lose their simplicity and unambiguity, they lose their source. And there is a mass of slowly flowing spectacle, each element of which is understandable and logical, and everything as a whole is inexplicable. It is inexplicable, like some kind of natural phenomenon, which is its own cause, and the question of the ultimate goal is inappropriate here. What is the purpose of, say, a gust of wind or rain?

All of them: Lopakhin, Ranevskaya, Gaev, Petya Trofimov are equal before this nameless force. Here there are neither those who make a historical mistake, nor those who help to make it, there are neither powerless nor strong men. And, I confess, for the first time I understood so clearly why Ranevskaya cannot hear anything about the sale of the garden, the lease of the plot. Maksakova-Ranevskaya really does not understand what is at stake. So bewildered would be a man who, in order to improve his affairs, would be offered to sell a leg or an eye. Or rent out. And Lopakhin buys a cherry orchard also because he loves Ranevskaya and wants to have at least something in which she is involved. And he cuts down the cherry orchard also from love, hunted, hopeless, melted into hatred. But remaining love.

Novaya Gazeta, July 14, 2003

Elena Dyakova

Bald hare

A.P. Chekhov "The Cherry Orchard". Directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus (International Stanislavsky Foundation, Meno Fortas Theater (Vilnius)

Music, music - a short, obsessive, half-forgotten melody. She was taught on the clavichord with a governess, they danced to her at home balls. Here she goes into a military march (supported by regimental pipes and a distant drum from behind the scenes). Here it breaks at the halfway point. And it can never be completely forgotten, or completely remembered. So - under a strange through waltz - they played "Forest" at Meyerhold's. Under) that wonderful short melody, the whole "Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshus goes. For the first time, the theater of the Lithuanian Mr. spoke in Russian: Ranevskaya - Lyudmila Maksakova, Lopakhin - Evgeny Mironov, Firs - Alexei Petrenko, Gaev - Vladimir Ilyin, Petya Trofimov - Igor Gordin, Anya - Yulia Marchenko, Varya - Inga Oboldini.

This premiere - eagerly awaited since last summer - opened a new theater venue in Moscow: the hall of the STD Center on Strastnoy...

It's dark in a dilapidated house. Firs sorts things piled on the back of a chair.

Gaev's crumpled coat, the worn overcoat of the late gentleman-grandfather, Anya's absurdly crimson, tasteless half-childish coat to tears, Petya Trofimov's dubious raincoat. Firs has his own relationship with every thing. One he crumples. Others nurse for a long time, with unbearable tenderness.

It seems that only their things remained from a whole crowd of people. Cloth shadows of lives. Dropped shells.

Four acts - and six hours later it will become clear: "The Cherry Orchard" by Nyakroshus is completely looped. At its beginning is its end. Alone in an empty house, old Firs sorts out the belongings of those who are no longer here. And never will.

Least of all in the performance of Nyakroshus are the delights of a dying garden. Wheezing, screaming, endless repetitions, suffering aggression reign in the impoverished house that the heirs, out of laziness, so easily ate "on candy".

Everything and everyone is out of business here. It is absolutely impossible to finish the work, to bring the thing to mind. The feeling of being half asleep, half-effort, bogged down in the void, almost physical. An absurd staircase, almost in the shape of a Mobius figure, lies in the middle of the stage (Lopakhin and Petya Trofimov try to adapt it to the case, but in vain). In the hallway, a pale, speechless lady in a black widow's silk dress clumsily chops firewood, with a bewildered library smile. There is no lady without speeches in the play, but this mute figure, introduced by Nyakroshyus into the play, expands the plot, replaces the ancient choir of those expelled from the house.

The actors are not playing an A.P. play. Chekhov, but a collection of types of Russian life. And a collection of sad notes about each type.

Ranevskaya-Maksakova, dressed in an Art Nouveau travel attire, lies on a black velvet sofa, like a tomb figure in the necropolis of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Her chiseled, self-confident, sharp and thoroughbred charm is at the center of everything. For her, and not for the estate, Lopakhin fights almost to the final. Yes, and Petya Trofimov (played by Igor Gordin aggressive - like Mayakovsky at the evening of the "political purge of poets" in 1922) is secretly in love with Ranevskaya. (And that is precisely why he growls and steps on her, like Mayakovsky at the aforementioned evening - on the absent Akhmatova.)

The Cherry Orchard is the only soil where such women could flourish. From this soil they grew and went into it, returning as the heroines of books who will pass on this code to their daughters. The code is eternal and valuable in itself. Like poems in a dead language. New generations of Russian women will not be able to remember him (and the books written in this garden will prevent them from forgetting).

Already the native daughter of Ranevskaya (gentle and graceful, but frightened by poverty, wild and careless upbringing) in Nyakroshus's performance does not at all inherit her mother's brilliance. Anya, subtly played by Yulia Marchenko, is a victim of the decline of the family and the whole civilization. The victim of Ranevskaya and Gaev, who are no longer able to bear the common duty of their descendants and ancestors.

These owners of the Cherry Orchard are the last of their kind. They are dying out like an impoverished small nation. The loneliness of Ranevskaya is emphasized by her inability to respond to the enthusiastic, boyish love of Lopakhin-Mironov.

Ranevskaya's orphanhood is even more emphasized by the presence of Gaev's brother.

"I am a man of the eighties..." Vladimir Ilyin proclaims. There is laughter in the hall. People of the 1980s are recognizable in this master who has lost its gloss. He is sick, Leonid Andreevich, his remarks "Who ?!" and the famous "Yellow in the middle .." - a meaningless muttering of an almost autistic consciousness. Gaev is crushed by a debt that he cannot bear, and the fruits of his impotence, looking out from every crack in the house.

And, it seems, Gaev is played completely "from nature". All Russia is their garden. The fruits are ripe.

Another breed is coming, another nature. Inga Oboldina wonderfully plays the seven-veined Varia - stooped, aggressive, who lost the remnants of her upbringing in the battle with poverty, who baked the whole house with her sovereign love.

These would help hundreds of families (say, nations) to physically survive in the 1920s. It is even possible to keep the last silver spoons. But - only spoons! Varya's tenderness (suddenly flashing miraculously in the last, hopeless scene with Lopakhin) is as if killed in advance by communal poverty, muzzled in the night line for vegetable oil.

And Varya is a victim of a collapsed house. Oh, how disturbed her children will be...

The performance is anachronistic: all layers of the 20th century are in his memory.

They have a lot of children in them, in the aging orphans of the Cherry Orchard. Gaev, Anya and Varya selflessly throw colored candies at the audience. At the "evening" with the orchestra on the day of the sale of the estate, they appear in paper rabbit ears.

Anya nurses the shabby and dusty Stuffed Hare with bald ears. God knows what family legend is associated with a monster shot, right, under Peter the Great. The charm of a bald, rotten artifact is clearly understandable only to its own.

This is what gives the Hare, Mr. Gaevs, the grandeur of almost the entire estate culture.

Only Lopakhin, having acquired this foreign treasure along with all his estate, secretly, with horror and disgust, shakes his hands off his dusty fur.

And in the finale, when they all "leave for the station" - they go into the darkness, to the black backdrop, behind the bare twigs of the garden, only the dying Firs and the Stuffed Hare with bald ears remain at the forefront.

And instead of axes, machine guns rattle in the garden. Not on the trunks - on the bodies.

Well, naturally. Why didn't we know before?

Trembling, rushing about, falling into the darkness are the hare ears of the devastated grand lady of the era of decadence and her tender, naive daughter, and the seven-veined praying man Varya, and the half-asleep, absolutely powerless gentleman with lollipops in the pockets of his coat, and the bespectacled eternal student "with ideas", and the energetic millionaire.

After all, that "encyclopedia of Russian life" ended with that. The scene of departure has long seemed to the reader to be a scene of flight in 1918: "For the last time, look at these walls, at the windows ... The late mother loved to walk around this room ..."

In the smart, bilious, forgotten notes of the writer and Left Social Revolutionary Yevgeny Lundberg, who traveled in 1917-1919. half of Russia, there is an amazing scene.

Caucasus. Summer 1917. Tomorrow they will burn the estate. (Lundberg himself campaigned there. He did not call for burning, but he did not dissuade him either.) The lady was severely warned by the peasants. Early in the morning, a britzka hurriedly leaves for the mountains: the grandmother is crying, the granddaughter of eighteen years old is crying, the old man is crying on the goats. Knots are piled in a chaise in a heap. And a bouquet trembles from above, hastily broken in a doomed garden!

Why not a draft of the finale of "The Cherry Orchard" in Petya Trofimov's recording?

And the smart and bilious SR writer Lundberg was shot in 1937.

Well, of course: not Lopakhin, who believes so much that "he bought an estate better than which there is in the world," but the Red Rooster took possession of the garden.

The performance curls up into a ring, into a Möbius strip.

The machine guns and the engines of the emergency vehicles rumble in the darkness. Chekhov's heroes are falling. Barely alive, Firs will sort out the belongings of the executed.

And rotten, so beloved by the family that no longer exists, the Stuffed Hare, raising his bald ears, stands in the void - dusty, like an old reader.

The play is a hundred years old. Nobody is alive anymore. A curtain. It's time to leave the room. Look for another encyclopedia of Russian life.

INTERVIEW IN THE DRESSING ROOM

Lyudmila MAKSAKOVA: Ranevskaya is a very sick person, but no one noticed this in a hundred years

Lyudmila Vasilyevna, what was more important for you to play - Ranevskaya as a hieroglyph of the beauty of the "old world" or the share of her guilt in the fact that this world collapsed?

I think there is something else in there. Ranevskaya, her perception of the world is a very fine structure. And you need to understand: what is the first trouble? Main trouble?

And this is the death of her son. Seven-year-old Grisha. All. The rest she perceives in a shifted form. And if you approach her, this is a person who does not quite control his psyche. Remember the play, because this is a cross-cutting motive: "Grisha, my boy ... Have mercy, have pity ...". And she feels guilty for this death. She, like a very Russian person, constantly bears this terrible guilt of hers.

The performance does not seem to be a psychological drama, but a system of symbols. But you are playing the tragedy of the soul, and not the mystery of the death of the rightful heir of the Garden?

Symbols are impossible to play! The director can make such an add-on, but the actor is alive and can only play a living thing.

He is a very demanding director. But I'm used to it! Petr Naumovich Fomenko is also a very demanding director. And Roman Grigoryevich Viktyuk is also a very demanding director. Another question is how they bring the actor to life and turn it into the figure that they need? Some are gingerbread. Others - with a whip. Still, Nyakroshus is closer to the whip. He is a harsh person. But the result is important, I suppose.

The duet Ranevskaya - Anya lined up very interestingly in the performance. What does your heroine think about her duty to her daughter? Is he fulfilled?

What does he think? He thinks they will never see each other again. Ranevskaya knows that she has two Mondays left to live ... After all, she is a very sick person! The play is a hundred years old, they write about it all the century, but no one noticed this: it is suffocating! "My nerves are better ... everything is fine ..." - yes, she is lying! And everyone says: "Goodbye, girl, see you soon ...". And she herself understands that this farewell at the station is the last ...

Igor GORDIN: Nyakroshyus leaves the opportunity to improvise

Igor, with Kama Ginkas in "The Lady with the Dog" you played Chekhov's Gurov as a subtle person. More subtle than he himself would like, than he needs to survive and live comfortably ... How did you risk now playing such a grotesque Petya Trofimov? Aggressive, militant, didactic? It seems that Lopakhin will not buy the estate, but Petya will requisition it in the name of the people - he looks so much like a man of the 1920s ...

I myself was interested in trying something, to get away from the heroic and romantic theme. And that was the job of the director. Eymuntas Petrovich said when he was analyzing the roles: Petya is an unkind character. Rather, even evil. The most stilted in the play. The only one who does not have a single living word. Petya Trofimov is the only person in the story who is not sorry. As for the "man of the 1920s" - I don't know, I didn't think about it. Petya was written by Chekhov. It is such in Chekhov - what other assumptions are needed?

- How did you work with Eymuntas Nyakroshyus?

Very interesting! We rehearsed the six-hour performance for only a month. "Lady with a dog" at Ginkas - three or four months. Ginkas always builds the actor's role in detail, clearly pronounces everything "by moments". Nyakroshyus sets a common goal, and then there are many opportunities to improvise. But the problems are very deep...

That is, you are now "playing Chekhov" for two complete perfectionists, but their perfectionism is polarly different?

Yes! And it's a great school...

Results, July 15, 2003

Marina Zayonts

Hunting for hares

The International K. S. Stanislavsky Foundation in the newly opened premises of the STD Cultural Center showed "The Cherry Orchard" staged by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus

The last premiere of the expiring Moscow season, as expected, became its main event. The most diverse opinions about this performance will be expressed, but still nothing larger and more significant can be named. The venture with the invitation of Nyakroshyus was announced a year ago, and even then the Moscow theatergoers were excited to the extreme, since attempts to lure the director to Moscow had been made a long time ago, but without success. Why the Stanislavsky Foundation succeeded is a mystery. Until now, the Foundation has quietly and peacefully been involved in charity work and handed out acting awards; However, Nyakroshyus explains his agreement by the fact that it was "The Cherry Orchard" that was proposed, he was going to stage it one way or another (all other Chekhov's plays have already been staged by Nyakroshyus).

After all, there aren't many directors in the world who would be described with casual ease as a genius. And there is no doubt that the Lithuanian director Eymuntas Nyakroshyus is gifted beyond measure. His performances are admired, they are resolutely and proudly not accepted, but no one can explain how this is done, imagine from what dreams the mise-en-scenes, images and metaphors that amaze everyone are born and then appear on the stage.

His performances are easy to distinguish from others (you can accidentally enter the hall where they are going, and in five minutes it will become clear - Nyakroshus), but watching them is not at all easy. If you want to have a good time, relax after work, laugh and enjoy looking at familiar actors' faces, they are not for you. The natural craving for the familiar in this case is best left at the entrance to the theater: Nyakroshus, reading a well-known play, discovers in it what others do not notice, and does not look in the direction of the generally accepted. He never seeks to surprise, but clearly wants to influence. His performances require serious mental commitment, they delight and exhaust at the same time. In addition, they are almost always unusually long. The Cherry Orchard starts at 6 pm and ends at 12 am. Four acts, three intermissions.

One way or another, but the excitement in the summer theatrical public was heated to the limit. All tickets for five premiere screenings were sold at exorbitant prices, crowds of the afflicted besieged a small theater venue, just like in the old Soviet times. The impatient expectation of the next directorial masterpiece by Eymuntas Nyakroshus reigned in the air and inflamed the atmosphere of the densely packed hall for all six hours. It's probably nice. In any case, it invigorates, excites the blood, excites pride. And really, what else can a director dream of, if not about world fame. It is known, after all, that soldier who does not aspire to become a general is bad. But then he became one, so what? In a deafening, impetuous stream, the delights of fans, the envy of enemies and awards, awards, awards merge. Now he has everything but one thing - the right to fail. A masterpiece a year, and not a step back. For Nyakroshus, who, like the fabulous Kolobok, left everyone to become independent, this is truly a difficult test. After all, he is not one of those "geniuses" that proudly replicate themselves, and does not know how to bake masterpieces, like pancakes, with extraordinary ease. He works painfully and for a long time, he may not be in the mood, his fantasy, seemingly inexhaustible, can doze off - patience is required here. A total of two months were allotted for The Cherry Orchard, which is unusually short for Nyakroshus. And, of course, the proposed scene was small for him. This director thinks big, he needs space, scope. Apparently, he did not consider it possible to refuse in the process of work, and that's what happened.

A not quite finished product came out, no doubt, excessive, which obviously did not have enough air in the cramped hall for the invented story to harmoniously develop, rise and soar above the stage, as is usually the case with Nyakroshus's performances. It was cramped here both for his mise-en-scenes (which is probably why they sometimes seem needlessly repeated) and his fantasies. They promise that in the fall the performance will be played on the big stage, and, presumably, Nyakroshus will remove all excesses. We still have to react to what has been shown.

Here it makes sense to make a reservation. Nyakroshyus is not just a genius, he is a super professional. It seems that he can stage everything, including the Rules of the Road, and we will still sit spellbound, open-mouthed in surprise. In comparison with many performances that surround us, The Cherry Orchard is a grandiose work, it contains several absolutely brilliant scenes, most of the actors play excellently there, and all claims made against it can only be correlated with other performances by Nyakroshus himself, and not with the more.

To understand what it is about, it is useful to watch the same play as presented by some other director (not necessarily mediocre), where everything is decorous, moderate and decent. It lasts as long as it should, nothing seems superfluous, no questions, one grace. Subtle, delicate, intelligent people come out, say a text that is painfully familiar and suffer quietly. The word "decent" is definitely not suitable for Nyakroshus, his performances sharply and even rudely break the usual string of words so that the overplayed play begins to sound like it was just written.

The scenery, as always with Nyakroshyus, is extremely minimalist. Two peeling pillars from the old garden arch - the remains of the estate, for some reason sports rings hang from above, to which a cane was attached in the fourth act, and they began to suspiciously resemble Chekhov's famous pince-nez. Instead of a garden along the backdrop, on thin sticks, there are white weathervanes-propellers like crosses (scenographer Nadezhda Gultyaeva). This is the Motherland, people come here not with the hope of salvation, they come to die. The first exit of Ranevskaya with her household is always expected as an event, more or less theatrically furnished. At Nyakroshus's, they come out one at a time, urged on by the bustling Varya (Inga Strelkova-Oboldina), grouped in the center, with their backs to the audience, waving their hands, greeting no one knows whom. And Ranevskaya (Lyudmila Maksakova), dressed in white, comes out unnoticed, from somewhere in a dark corner, drags a black bench behind her like a big suitcase on wheels, puts it in the center and lies down on it.

Any question, even the most absurd one, is resolved here as a matter of life and death. Actors play so passionately, extremely and clearly, as they have not played on our stages for a long time. They do not have a moment of peace, each of them invented the most complex internal (but also physical, as always with Nyakroshus) score that fills the entire space of the performance. Lovely Chekhov's girls Varya, Anya (a student of the Shchukin school Yulia Marchenko), Dunyasha (Anna Yanovskaya) flutter around the stage like frightened birds, without sitting down, life is lived on the run, skipping, jumping. They speak loudly, loudly to tears. Everything is exaggerated in them - household chores, delight, love. It is exaggerated so that it becomes scary, is about to break. And Epikhodov (Ivan Agapov), twenty-two misfortunes, is not at all timid, as is commonly thought. He knows exactly why he carries a gun with him. He grabbed it - and straight to Yasha: "Have you read Buckle?" - and shoots, shoots with anguish, with all his might. And Pishchik (Sergey Pinegin), if he bothers Ranevskaya with his problems, grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her like a doll.

Many scenes are drawn to describe one after another. How touching Gaev (Vladimir Ilyin) lays out a handful of his favorite candies in front of his nieces and enthusiastically swears: "The estate will not be sold." How Ranevskaya and old Firs (Aleksey Petrenko) stare at each other, carefully and gently touching their hands, cheeks, ears, hair. How a party is invented in anticipation of the news of the auction - frighteningly wild, convulsive dances to the muffled sounds of the drum. And the ridiculous tricks of Charlotte (Irina Apeksimova), where Anya and Varya portray hares that are being hunted. Everything here is like in a children's song: a bunny went out for a walk, a hunter runs out and shoots. Bang-bang, oh-oh-oh, my bunny is dying. And finally, the climax: Lopakhin (Evgeny Mironov) arrived, leaned close to Ranevskaya, said: "The Cherry Orchard is mine now" - and wipes her tears with a handkerchief. And she stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth so as not to scream, and she sits there, frozen, with a gag in her mouth. He shouts: “Musicians, play distinctly,” but instead of music, birds suddenly sang, squealed, chirped. Their hubbub sounded louder and louder, and it became more and more unbearable to listen to it, it seemed that a little more, and the eardrums would burst, and at the same time the heart would break.

Lopakhin was invented and played, by the way, in strict accordance with Chekhov's text. It is said after all - a man, Mironov played him. He played a dark, unbridled peasant soul, in which God knows what is mixed: good and evil, gross ignorance and craving for beauty. After all, he was waiting for this woman so much, he loved her so much, he saw her and sang from the fullness of feelings about how, "turning into a falcon, he admired the turtledove." And then he took and killed, completely unexpectedly for himself. For all his imagination, Nyakroshyus is an absolutely concrete director, even literal, so Petya Trofimov (Igor Gordin) is, first of all, a shabby gentleman, as Chekhov says. He is one of those idiots who is above love, funny, stifled, worthless, for such an idea of ​​​​universal equality - salvation, so he shouts them out hysterically passionately, choking, choking and stumbling. So it is eager to lead everyone into a new life, but, of course, it will die along with others. In this play according to Nyakroshyus, no one has a future. Everyone will be hunted down like rabbits until they are completely exterminated. And who is to blame? Here it is the eternal intellectual question. God knows. Probably fate, life, history.

Most often, Nyakroshus has the ending that pulls to retell again and again. You walk down the street, you meet a friend, you grab a button and you start telling how the Chekhov sisters, without wiping their tears, stubbornly piled birch wells on the stage; how Hamlet Sr. mourned his son, sending his child to death; how desperately and enlightenedly the Miserere sang at the end of Macbeth, Shakespeare's darkest play. I will not describe the finale of The Cherry Orchard, in my opinion, it is not worthy of Nyakroshus. Too frontal. They say that by the autumn he is going to come up with a new one. Then we'll tell you.

Culture, July 17, 2003

Irina Alpatova

Seven Circles of the Garden

Russian debut of Eymuntas Nyakroshyus

The finale of the Moscow theatrical season became its culmination. And nothing prevented this - neither summer relaxation, nor insane fatigue from oversaturation with stage events, including the Chekhov Festival. By the way, this festival, despite its name, paradoxically almost did not present Chekhov. But Nyakroshus did it. The expected event was initially squared: Nyakroshyus' new work in itself plus his Russian directorial debut. The Lithuanian master, long elevated to the rank of genius, was almost impossible to get a production outside of his historical homeland. It has only become a reality in recent years. The first lucky Italians. Now it's Moscow's turn. A year ago, the International Konstantin Stanislavsky Foundation announced the Cherry Orchard project (together with the Meno Fortas Theatre, Vilnius). Today we were able to see the result that resulted in a six-hour mystery: mysterious, funny, tragic, emotional, rational, acrobatic. There is everything - merged and divided, joining and flowing, with a change of rhythms, tonalities, moods.

By staging The Cherry Orchard, Nyakroshyus completed his Chekhov cycle. But it was broken, wedged powerfully and sonorously, by the Lithuanian Shakespearean ("Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet", "Macbeth", "Othello"). These performances were also striking in their duration and at the same time ... laconicism. Nyakroshus extremely boldly rejected the text as one of the main components of the performance. He made huge cuts, swapped scenes, cut monologues into music, silence, sonic pulses. He gave us "what is behind the words", provoking other meanings and composing new compositions. In "The Cherry Orchard" almost not a single word has been abbreviated, moreover, a spontaneous and organic acting "gag" has been added. But the director still remained true to himself. He doesn't put on a play. There are others for that, their name is legion, and you can languish from boredom in much more small-format "gardens".

Nyakroshus travels throughout the play - being distracted, carried away, returning back. He seems to be starting an old game, setting new rules at the same time. And they catch each other's "views": Chekhov's - on Russia, his own - on Chekhov and Russia, this and that, the actor's - on the director, the audience - on the metamorphoses of a textbook story. Everything is equal and equal. Not everything, however, is understandable and lends itself to instant decoding. As always, Nyakroshus has a flurry of metaphors, codes, techniques, tricks. And suddenly you catch yourself on the most paradoxical thought - knowledge of your native language interferes. Watching Lithuanian performances by Nyakroshus without headphones or captions is a delight, and there are no verbal props for you. Immediately, sometimes the certainty of the textbook text does not allow one to squeeze between the words into the theatrical space composed by the director. Fortunately, only at certain moments. And judging by the Hamburg account (no other is applicable to Nyakroshus), it is clear that the actors have not always succeeded either. To combine the director's metaphysics and the usual domestic psychologism, strung on the justification of each "physical action" - oh, how difficult. Yes, even for the first time. Jogging, jumping, falling - a desperate question freezes in the actor's eyes: why? However, everything is just beginning, and it's a sin to judge the future by debut performances. Time cures.

Everyone, but not the heroes of Nyakroshus' performance, because they are out of time. They have already crossed the line beyond which - infinity. It remains to walk in circles - hell, garden. However, there is no garden, just as there is no estate itself, and even more so the "respected closet". There is Firs (Aleksey Petrenko) - the eternal keeper and at the same time an attribute of what was. He will begin (for the umpteenth time!) this performance: he will slowly rise from behind an old chair littered with a pile of clothes. Slowly, one after another, he will begin to take off his coats, raincoats, frock coats, shake off the dust, carefully putting something aside, something lumpy and throwing it aside. He knows who is who. When the time comes, he will take the place of this very "closet" so that Gaev (Vladimir Ilyin) has someone to turn to. But this is after. In the meantime, like an old dresser, he is preparing acting exits.

And they are comedians. A wandering camp wandering in search of its Garden - to stop, rest, remember something, experience something, play something and move on. Not to the mythical Paris or Kharkov, but all in the same circle. Two dilapidated low columns left from the former entrance gate symbolize a stop. Instead of trees - a palisade of twigs with weather vane figures planted on them. The columns are slightly reminiscent of tombstones in an abandoned cemetery (scenography by Nadezhda Gultyaeva). There is all sorts of evil in there. No wonder the blind-sighted Firs - Petrenko suddenly begins to clobber the fallen girdle with a stick - like a snake. Dry branches piled up for a fire that no one will be able to kindle - matches go out, no spark is struck from stones. Everything has been dead for a long time.

And then people stubbornly and unconsciously try to revive this garden, humanize it. Raised hands with trembling fingers are intertwined like branches. Tall and thin Anya (Yulia Marchenko) in a long white shirt bends, sways like a tree in the wind. Anya, Varya (Inga Oboldina) and Dunyasha (Anna Yanovskaya), having taken water in their mouths, make funny gurgling sounds - and the "garden" immediately responds with a nightingale trill. And when Lopakhin (Evgeny Mironov), exhausted by his own victory, barely audibly demands "music", it is no longer a trill, but the deafening whistle of the Nightingale the Robber covers the stage and the hall with a shock wave. And it is clear as day: he will sweep away, blow away, throw out of the longed-for Garden and Yermolai Alekseevich. No one can break the silence and emptiness.

And even more so these "klutzes". Ranevskaya's meeting, which had been preparing for so long, turns out to be a miss. While everyone is waving their hands to the void at the gate, Lyubov Andreevna (Lyudmila Maksakova) almost crawls onto the stage from a completely different side, dragging a heavy couch behind her. And then he lays down on it, as in a coffin, placing a hard roller under his head. The meeting intonation sounds like a farewell: Dunyasha drops flowers on the lying chest, and everyone takes turns kissing her hand, then her cheek. Joy seems to be simulated, fun turns into anguish, lyricism of memories - into hysterical crying. There are not enough words, and the enchanted Lopakhin-Mironov, stretching out in front of Ranevskaya, suddenly starts a song about a turtledove. The situation is elevated to the absolute: this anguish, this crying against a piercing musical background (composer Mindaugas Urbaitis) - throughout a long, long time ago, once and for all ruined life.

This escheated, timeless life, meanwhile, is full of living signs and symbols. Nyakroshus brilliantly builds a symbolic score of hands. A gesture hardened to automatism betrays belonging to a circle, a clan, a way of life. Ranevskaya - Maksakova easily plays with a coin, tossing and catching it in her palm. Ranevskaya wipes her tears, theatrically shaking them from her fingers, as if from wings. Lopakhin - Mironov, unconsciously trying to repeat this, fails and ironically applauds. The fingers of Vari-Oboldina automatically fold into a pinch and, like a magnet, are drawn to the forehead. And no matter how much Lopakhin unclenches her hands, all his efforts are in vain. Here you can not hear the broken string and the sound of an ax, but this sound is tapped out by fists, beaten by palms.

Noises and sounds are no less symbolic. In Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" only Epikhodov plays with a revolver. Nyakroshus is firing with might and main - single shots, friendly volleys, cannonade. Revolvers, guns and even sticks are involved. Epikhodov (Ivan Agapov) fires at the curly-haired Yasha (Anton Kukushkin), the noisy Petya Trofimov (Igor Gordin) threatens with a pistol. Charlotte (Irina Apeksimova) funny and ugly shoots Anya and Varya's "bunnies" with ridiculous kindergarten "ears". This "trick" will be continued in the final, when everyone will become "hares". Crawling into a narrow gap between the backdrop and the twigs, those expelled from the garden will try to hide behind them, bending their heads and "pressing their ears", to the accompaniment of a deafening shelling. Here is a very modern and frank ending to Chekhov's "comedy".

Nyakroshus literally organizes the roll call of times. Lopakhin - Mironov, who bought an estate with the graves of serf ancestors, desperately knocks on the floor with a stick, "transmitting" the news, and this knock is immediately echoed by a booming drum echo. Nyakroshus, like all of us, no longer believes the passionate speeches of Petya - Gordin and forces the latter to pronounce them, either balancing on an absurd, shaky and crooked ladder, or climbing under it. Behind the scenes, he will definitely crash from it to the textbook remark: "Petya fell down the stairs." However, there are no number of risky and exaggerated falls. The force of gravity is too great, and any jump ends with a booming blow to the floor. These blows are emphasized, multiply, become synchronously-collective.

Nyakroshus is alien to sentimentality and frankly ruthless towards the temporary inhabitants of the impromptu "garden". This does not mean that he does not feel sorry for them as a human being. The reason is in the original and universal doom. There are no winners and there will be no survivors. How incredibly difficult it is for Yevgeny Mironov to play the scene of victory with the intonations of the defeated. And how amazingly he copes with this, demonstrating the highest acting aerobatics. An attempt to buy not a garden, but another, unattainable life dimension, where Lopakhin has no road, suffers a natural collapse. In the fourth act, he will arrange a lonely farewell meal - the tablecloth is thrown right on the floor, on it is some kind of ridiculous jug with a tied bouquet of flowers. Even Yasha "drinks" champagne with obvious disgust, and then he casually dumps everything into a heap with his feet and wraps it in an unnecessary bundle. The "luggage" of those departing is a beautifully packed emptiness, and Epikhodov-Agapov easily crumples up, crumples all these useless pieces of paper.

And in place of the posts from the gate to the finale, there will remain a structure that looks like a scaffold and a cross at the same time. As soon as you touch it, your hands instantly freeze. And Anya - Marchenko, who doomedly tried on Petya's glasses, getting ready for a "new life", carefully puts children's fluffy mittens on her mother's hands.

Questions about Firs will be shouted out into the echoing void and, of course, will remain unanswered, because the "hospital" in this space that is rapidly losing earthly signs is as mythical a place as Paris. Firs - Petrenko will drag an armful of grass, slowly chew a green bunch, cover the remaining one with the same chair and, as in the prologue, settle down, hide behind it. Until the next "circle", which someday, turning around, will again carry everyone to the gates of the Garden. His attraction is endless.

Literary newspaper, July 23, 2003

Inna Vishnevskaya

Hopelessly ill Dr. Chekhov

"The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshus

The play that Chekhov called a comedy. The Art Theater is a drama, staged by E. Nyakroshus, it sounded like a great tragedy, where both the author's living pain and all the writer's predictions for the future were preserved. I would call this performance a special powerful director's project, a kind of ancient "Oresteia", built on an integral stage Chekhoviana, in which "The Cherry Orchard" is just one link from Chekhov's continuous Human Comedy. As if his "Seagull" was also played here: again a brother and sister, again a mother losing her son, again an abandoned estate, again a sick old man remains alone. And the play "Three Sisters" sounds in this performance, again sisters and a brother, again an abandoned House, where none of its owners has been going for a long time.

The Cherry Orchard expands and fills up in the performance presented at the new STD Theater Center on Strastnoy Boulevard: Chekhov the prose writer's motifs from the stories My Life, Three Years, Boring Story, Ionych are heard here. And from there it is as if there are people here who can neither serve, nor work, nor, in the end, live, but are constantly seeking a new beautiful life in other, better times and cities, in other, more honest, more humane places of service. And at the same time, there is not a single superfluous word introduced into the play, not a single replica borrowed from anywhere in the performance, only The Cherry Orchard, only its effective, visual, speech space. But what a huge, dimensionless this play turned out to be, and not only due to the weighted rhythms and the abundance of directorial metaphors! The endless, hours-long action of the play was formed, it seems, for purely artistic reasons: there are no beginnings, no ends, no foretastes of rock, no final chords. And therefore, the heroes cannot change anything, nor the fabric of their existence is woven by them, now and then ancestors appear in their memory, someone's half-forgotten faces, disappeared shadows, silent voices. They themselves were put up for auction even earlier than their garden. But no one needs them, no one takes them, no one evaluates them. This is the past, these are all hopelessly ill, like the oldest of them - Firs. This is precisely the novelty of the director's view of this performance, that it forces us to reconsider the traditional truth that Lopakhin alone is the destroyer of the Cherry Orchard. He is not alone, in modern terms, the "new Russian", is going to strike with an ax on the luxurious trees of noble estates. The garden was destroyed by its owners themselves, leaving for a foreign land, constantly chatting about a better life, that they would plant a better garden than before, that all of Russia is our Garden.

And therefore, when at the end of the performance the inhabitants of the boarded-up House, finding themselves somewhere in bottomless darkness, suddenly pull on hats with long dazzling white hare ears, it will become especially clear that they, these inhabitants, are also some symbolic hares that they themselves undermined your garden.

And all this powerful directorial construction had to fall on the shoulders of the actors, whose star names in themselves promised huge audience success. And the first among them is Lyudmila Maksakova-Ranevskaya, as if continuing her Chekhovian. More recently, the actress played the role of Arkadina in the Vakhtangov play "The Seagull". Both there and here she is like a guest, knowing that nothing belongs to her anymore. Excellent is the first appearance of Ranevskaya in the House. While all those who meet them rush to the door, she quietly, slowly comes out alone from somewhere on the side, unnoticed by anyone, pulls some kind of couch not a couch, rather a cast-iron tombstone, lies down on it, covering her eyes with a large black mourning hat. As if from non-existence, this Ranevskaya appeared, and although she still has to live and live, she already guesses that soon she will also go into non-existence. And then, just as figurative, just as natural are Maksakova's other scenes, where, without hearing herself, she intensifies and intensifies the sound, now and then as if falling into the desert of memories, into the bitterness of illusions. And this Ranevskaya Firs is especially close, he is from the past, but she is also from the past, he is not alive, but she, as it were, is no longer here, and, feeling this, the old footman puts some heavy copper under her head on the tombstone couch. column. They are both forgotten, they are both fallen flowers from cherry trees. Where else, in what performance could such a duet take place - Ranevskaya and Firs, so closely intertwining their hands, so gently feeling each other's faces, so that once again, now for the last time, with sadness to recall the past, she is the departed young will, he - gone serf bondage.

But here Lopakhin reports that he bought a cherry orchard. Ranevskaya - Maksakova sits a little further away from the new owner and quietly, with light cries, tries to lure the nightingales to her, because they have not yet flown away to the new owner. But no, they flew away - in response to her, only individual timid whistles, and Lopakhina welcomes such a deafening, cannon-like, thunderous chorus of nightingale voices, which is understandable - luck, life, dreams leave Ranevskaya, even the lyrical nightingales themselves now compose a hymn to the most capitalist worldview.

A worthy partner for Maksakova is artist Yevgeny Mironov in the role of Lopakhin. And this actor plays not just a mighty new force, but already its doom: after all, as you know, very little time will pass, and people like Lopakhin - merchants and businessmen, will follow the same state roads that the nobles followed, very soon both old and new owners of the Cherry Orchard will find themselves together again.

Reading this play by Chekhov, I always thought: why would Lopakhin, who undoubtedly loves Ranevskaya, not lend her money to save the Garden, because he has this money, and there is no need to ask for help from some mythical Yaroslavl grandmother. But when Mironov played Lopakhin, this riddle was resolved - he knows that Ranevskaya no longer needs the Garden, that this is just a whim, a habit, and he will be her, this Garden, now only a burden, only an obstacle to leaving for Paris, where there is also death, only now in the Champs Elysees. And yet, without feeling like a villain in the plot, Lopakhin-Mironov feels like a villain according to the laws of high tragedy. And he runs from the empty stage, covering his face with a black cloak or coat, disappears, as Shakespeare's Iago and Macbeth disappeared after their atrocities.

And it’s only a pity that other artists participating in this performance did not fully support the duet of Ranevskaya and Lopakhin. Epikhodov disappeared somewhere, he is neither heard nor seen, but this is the comedic side of all other tragic roles. His funny "twenty-two misfortunes" is also their tragic "twenty-two misfortunes." And Charlotte with her tricks is somehow invisible in the play, but this image is the reverse side of the image of Ranevskaya, Charlotte's funny tricks and tragic tricks in Ranevskaya's life are a special Chekhovian imagery, when comedy only deepens the drama.

I do not want to judge the excellent actors who played these roles, perhaps the director's miscalculation here, but somehow the performance is weakened by the lack of bright comedy, without which a major tragedy is also impossible.

"The Cherry Orchard" by Chekhov, Nyakroshyus, the community of Russian acting stars is an undoubted event in the life of both the Russian and the world stage. We learned once again that Chekhov is inexhaustible, that Nyakroshyus is a talented follower of the great Vakhtangov and Meyerhold, that such artists as Maksakova and Mironov are able to immerse their specific roles in an immense theatrical context, correlate them with the most famous roles of the world repertoire.

Screen and stage, number 27

Alla Shenderova

Nyakroshus bought the estate

premature conclusions

They say that Eymuntas Nyakroshyus was very fond of Efros' "The Cherry Orchard".

With their "Garden" both directors came to a strange monastery - Efros staged a play at Lyubov's "Taganka", and Nyakroshyus, at the suggestion of the Stanislavsky Foundation, made a play not with Lithuanians, but with Moscow stars.

Efros could not care about the expressiveness of the mise-en-scène, and he was able to convey the whole meaning of what was happening through the internal movements of the character that had become visible and at the same time easily converted foreign artists to his faith. Nyakroshus in The Cherry Orchard is primarily concerned with creating the environment of the performance as a kind of mysterious, reserved Zone. In this case, it arises not through the efforts of the artists, but in addition to them.

Just as Moses led the Jews through the desert for forty years so that they would forget about slavery, so Nyakroshus leads us for six hours in a row through the endless tragic back streets of his performance so that we fully realize the catastrophe that happened in the 17th year. It seems that he was seduced by the idea of ​​showing in one performance not all of Chekhov (as directors of the 20th century often did), but all of Russia, which we have lost. And we, the audience, seem to be ready to mourn her once again, but something in us resists this director's edification, we listen to his performance as bewildered and bewildered, like Ranevskaya and Gaev - to Lopakhin's idea of ​​​​cutting down a garden and letting him under the dachas.

Once upon a time, thinking about Chekhov, Andrei Bely admired his unintentional, cautious symbolism. Nyakroshus thickened and condensed Chekhov's transparent symbols to a frightening weight.

With the help of the composer Mindaugas Urbaitis, he dissected the extremely nervous melody of the Jewish orchestra from the Efros performance and turned it into a mocking funeral march with a clearly distinguishable tread of fate - with drum beats.

“In the third act, against the background of stupid stomping ... Horror enters,” Meyerhold wrote about The Cherry Orchard. For Nyakroshus, Horror enters with the first sound of music resounding in the prologue, when a huge hunched Firs (Aleksey Petrenko) grows up on a semi-dark stage as if from the ground, sorting out old master's dresses. What a comedy! In the ball scene, the movements of the characters are distorted to match the music - instead of dancing, they jump on one leg until they are breathless, grabbing themselves by the other.

Any game here lasts indefinitely and turns into torture. Varya (Inga Strelkova-Oboldina) now and then angrily calls Anya and beats a non-existent midge with a towel, Charlotte (Irina Apeksimova), instead of tricks, rolls billiard balls around the stage to exhaustion and sharpens her ax loudly. When the raging Petya quarrels with Ranevskaya, they are surrounded by a dense ring, roughly pushed together and shouted “Kiss!”, Going into the burning Khlyst ecstasy. And when Lopakhin (Evgeny Mironov) says "Music, play clearly!" - the answer becomes a hundred times amplified, unbearable bird chirping. So Sad takes revenge on Lopakhin for betrayal.

In a word, here, as in all Nyakroshyus's performances, there are scenes that are brilliant to the point of being dumbfounded, but even in them the director's pointing finger is seen. He punishes the audience, along with the heroes of the play, for failing to save their Garden, the actors - for the notorious psychologism. “You need psychological excuses for the slightest movement on stage, so play each etude for 20 minutes if you can’t do it any other way!” - heard his implacable voice.

The objects and sounds in this performance express the will of the director much more obediently and more accurately than people. The blue, peeling chair, on which Lopakhin was about to lean during the drunken monologue “I bought it,” took it and stuck his finger in it. Another chair, wrapped in a black velvet cover, is moved by Firs for a long time from place to place before Ranevskaya is handed over. As if he - a chair - must decide: is she worthy to sit on it? With the old master's coat, Firs treats with much more respect than with the current gentlemen.

Appearing to the audience for the first time, Ranevskaya (Lyudmila Maksakova) pulls a black couch behind her. The household huddled in the back of the stage and waved off into the distance, looking out for her from there, and she slowly put down the couch and lay down on the proscenium. One can only guess about the history of the objects inhabiting the Nyakroshyus performance, but the couch is probably as important to the inhabitants of the estate as the famous leather sofa for the Tolstoys in Yasnaya Polyana.

But the new flight of white stairs, which Lopakhin ordered for Ranevskaya's arrival, is meaningless from the very beginning and leads nowhere, like all Lopakhin's enterprise. (However, a crazy thought: maybe this staircase is the same flight to eternity that Andrei Bely once wrote about ?!)

In a word, the essence of what is happening in this performance is conveyed not by people, but by things. The soul of the Garden lies precisely in them. The images of Chekhov's heroes seem contradictory and far-fetched. Well, for example, Nyakroshyus emphasizes with every metaphor that Lopakhin is a tasteless, internally unclean boor (that's why he constantly washes himself right in front of the audience), and Evgeny Mironov, who plays Lopakhin, suddenly begins to paint the text in detail, breaking any metaphors, and even with barely noticeable smart strokes emphasizes own intelligence and sophistication.

Or Petya Trofimov by Igor Gordin. As conceived by the director, Petya is paranoid, bringing down his monologues on the inhabitants of the estate with such fury that it becomes clear why Ranevskaya's son drowned: the fit teacher, obsessed with the idea of ​​world revolution, did not follow him. The idea that in the near future Petya, having come to power, will slaughter all these "superfluous" people, is read from the very first minutes. But the performance lasts a long time, Petya screams ugly, squints his half-sighted eyes, paws the gullible Anya tastelessly and chases the petty-bourgeois Varya with a cobblestone - his pain makes him bored.

However, in this performance there is a character who completely owns the director's sympathies. This is Anya - a wonderful debut of third-year student Yulia Marchenko. Surprisingly tall, brittle, with naive blue eyes and a chirping voice, she seems to be the sister of many former heroines of Nyakroshus. Childishly crossing her thin arms, she depicts a cherry tree shaken by the wind and becomes a symbol of the Garden. The director worries about her alone, but her fate in this performance is a foregone conclusion: she is too tender, naive and absolutely unviable.

The mise-en-scène of The Three Sisters, which has long become an integral part of Nyakroshus' performances, appears here as well. Three girls: Anya, a cherry twig, Varya, thick-set and ruffled from household chores, and flirtatious Dunyasha (Anna Yanovskaya), gather at the forefront and chirp, sharing news with each other. And the Garden envelops them with tenderness, echoing their voices with birdsong.

But Ranevskaya Lyudmila Maksakova did not become a symbol of the Garden. Her defenseless doom is given to Anya, somewhat caricatured infantilism to Gaev (Vladimir Ilyin). Chekhov's key scenes of Ranevskaya with Lopakhin and Petya Trofimov in this performance look like inserted, rude numbers. Sometimes the director, following the text, allows Ranevskaya to break out into a monologue. Picturesquely lying down on the proscenium, she recites a monologue about sins. But this causes as much sympathy in the audience as in Lopakhin, who, having patiently listened to her, begins to applaud, as the characters of The Seagull applaud Arkadina's tirades.

At times, Ranevskaya tries to establish contact with the Garden - she knocks on the floor, calling the spirit of her ancestors for help, whistles and winks with someone invisible. No use - Sad doesn't hear her.

“Clever, very kind, absent-minded ... Only one death can calm down such a woman,” wrote Chekhov. There is no such woman in Nyakroshus' play. It's a pity. After all, the image written by Chekhov determined the fate of several generations of Russian women at once. How many of them, who have lost their native nest, will later end up in Paris! And for a long time - almost a whole century - the wives of European poets and artists (Eluard, Dali, Matisse, Picasso) will be Russian Ranev ...

People living at the turn of the ages are often compared to a ship sailing towards a wreck, or to blind men without a guide, or to lost children. The inhabitants of the Garden are deliberately childish, they occupy themselves with games to distract themselves from the feeling of impending disaster. Looking at how they mock the deaf Firs in unison, and then rapturously rush about, taking away the toy hare from Anya, you recall Mandelstam's poem, written a little later than Chekhov's comedy:

Burning with gold leaf
Christmas trees in the woods.
Toy wolves in the bushes
They look with terrible eyes.

The heroes of Nyakroshus are not wolves, but hares. And the comparison is persistent. While auctions are going on in the city, Anya and Varya pretend to be frightened rabbits, and Charlotte kills them with a toy gun. In the end, after leaving the house, all its inhabitants will put on paper ears and hide from the invisible Hunter among children's paper windmills, already fluttering under the ax of the unknown Woodcutter (this is the Garden, invented by the artist Nadezhda Gultyaeva). Left in a boarded-up house, the ancient Firs chews juicy on a handful of grass brought from somewhere...

And what is this Firs, - the reader will rightly stop me, - didn’t he become a masterpiece performed by Alexei Petrenko? Didn't. In addition to the happily found Anya, there are many good roles in this performance: Firs, Varya, Charlotte, Yasha (Anton Kukushkin), Epikhodov (Ivan Agapov), Simeonov-Pishchik (Sergey Pinegin), but something keeps calling them absolutely successful. Probably, the actors are hindered by stardom and the lack of a unified manner - everyone drags a trail of their previous roles into the performance. Or maybe the native Russian speech is to blame, depriving The Cherry Orchard and its characters of the mysterious foreign charm inherent in other Nyakroshus productions.

So what happens: the director, with a firm Lopakhin hand, took up the play, “there is nothing more beautiful”, it did not succumb to him, and therefore he broke it into “dachas” - an endless string of scenes that did not line up as a whole?

I have no answer. I admit that all critics' assessments are still premature, because Nyakroshyus rehearsed his performance on the big stage of the Vilnius Meno Fortas, and released it in Moscow, on the tiny and completely uninhabited stage of the STD cultural center. They say that in the fall the performance will be played on the stage of the Taganka Actors' Association (where Efros's The Cherry Orchard was once staged). Let's hope that on the spacious stage, a heap of directorial finds and gloomy instructive insights will line up in a magnificent bulk. The mass will move and float…

After the performance of Efros, there was a feeling of irretrievably lost beauty. And then suddenly the viewer discovered in himself the ability to detect fragments of this beauty in the most unexpected places. Apparently, the performance taught some special vision.

After The Cherry Orchard by Nyakroshus, it becomes clear that beauty has been lost because we (as, indeed, our ancestors) turned out to be completely unworthy of it. And it is useless to look for this beauty. You leave the STD building and circle for a long time along Strastnoy Boulevard with a befuddled head and a feeling of inescapable guilt.

Konstantin Stanislavsky as Gaev. Production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre. 1904

Leonid Leonidov as Lopakhin. Production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre. 1904© Album "Plays by A.P. Chekhov". Supplement to the magazine "The Sun of Russia", No. 7, 1914

Alexander Artyom as Firs. Production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre. 1904© Album "Plays by A.P. Chekhov". Supplement to the magazine "The Sun of Russia", No. 7, 1914

Vasily Kachalov as Petya Trofimov and Maria Lilina as Anya. Production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre, act II. 1904 © Album "Plays by A.P. Chekhov". Supplement to the magazine "The Sun of Russia", No. 7, 1914

Firs: "Let's go... They forgot about me." Production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre, act IV. 1904© Album "Plays by A.P. Chekhov". Supplement to the magazine "The Sun of Russia", No. 7, 1914

Cotillion. Production of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre, act III. 1904© Album "Plays by A.P. Chekhov". Supplement to the magazine "The Sun of Russia", No. 7, 1914

In this very first production of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov did not like much. The author's disagreements with Konstantin Stanislavsky, who staged a play written especially for the Moscow Art Theater, concerned the distribution of roles between the performers, mood and genre (Stanislavsky was convinced that he was staging a tragedy), even staged means that reflected the naturalistic aesthetics of the early Moscow Art Theater. “I will write a new play, and it will begin like this: “How wonderful, how quiet! No birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no nightingales, no clocks, no bells, and not a single cricket are heard,” Stanislavsky quoted Chekhov’s sarcastic joke about the sound score recreating the estate life. Today, not a single Chekhov biography or history of the Moscow Art Theater bypasses this conflict between the writer and the theater. But the oppressive atmosphere, streams of tears, and everything that frightened Chekhov is at odds with those few surviving fragments of later versions of The Cherry Orchard, a performance that remained in the theater repertoire until the second half of the 1930s and was constantly changing, including thanks to Stanislavsky. For example, with the short final scene with Firs recorded on film: the voice of the lackey performed by Mikhail Tarkhanov sounds in it - despite the situation of the servant forgotten in the house, how hard every movement is given to this decrepit old man, contrary to everything in general - suddenly unusually young. Just sobbing, Ranevskaya said goodbye to her youth on stage, and miraculously she returned to Firs in these very last minutes.

1954 Renault-Barro Company, Paris. Directed by Jean Louis Barraud

A scene from Jean Louis Barrault's The Cherry Orchard. Paris, 1954© Manuel Litran / Paris Match Archive / Getty Images

A scene from Jean Louis Barrault's The Cherry Orchard. Paris, 1954© Manuel Litran / Paris Match Archive / Getty Images

A scene from Jean Louis Barrault's The Cherry Orchard. Paris, 1954© Manuel Litran / Paris Match Archive / Getty Images

Prominent European productions of The Cherry Orchard only began to appear after the war. Theater historians explain this by the extremely strong impression Western directors had of the performance of the Moscow Art Theater, which took Chekhov's play on tour more than once. The Cherry Orchard, staged by Jean Louis Barrault, did not become a breakthrough, but it is a very interesting example of how the European theater, in search of its own Chekhov, slowly emerged from the influence of the Moscow Art Theatre. From the director Barro, who during these years discovered Camus and Kafka for himself and the audience of his theater, and continued to stage his main author, Claudel, one could expect to read Chekhov through the prism of the newest theater. But there is nothing of this in Barro's The Cherry Orchard: listening to the surviving recording of his radio broadcast, you remember about absurdism only when Gaev, in response to Lopakhin's business proposal about arranging dachas on the site of the estate, is indignant: “Absurde!” The Cherry Orchard staged by Renault-Barro Company is first of all (and strictly according to Chekhov) a comedy in which a huge place was given to music. Pierre Boulez, with whom the theater collaborated during these years, was responsible for her in the performance. The role of Ranevskaya was played by Barrot's wife, co-founder of the theater, who earned fame for herself precisely as a comic actress of the Comédie Francaise, Madeleine Renaud. And Barro himself unexpectedly chose the role of Petya Trofimov for himself: perhaps the hero was close to the great mime, who guessed the character of the merchant Lopakhin by his hands - “tender fingers, like those of an artist.”

1974 Teatro Piccolo, Milan. Directed by Giorgio Strehler

Rehearsal of the play "The Cherry Orchard" by Giorgio Strehler. Milan, 1974© Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images

Tino Carraro in Giorgio Strehler's The Cherry Orchard

Tino Carraro and Enzo Tarascio in Giorgio Strehler's The Cherry Orchard© Mario De Biasi / Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images

“Craig wants the set to be as mobile as music, and to help refine certain passages in a play, just as music can follow and emphasize turns in an action. He wants the scenery to change with the play,” the artist René Pio wrote in 1910 after meeting with the English director and set designer Gordon Craig. Luciano Damiani's set design in The Cherry Orchard directed by Giorgio Strehler, thanks to its amazing simplicity, has become perhaps the best example of this way of working with space in the modern theater. Over the snow-white stage was stretched a wide, in the entire depth of the stage, a translucent curtain, which at different moments calmly swayed over the heroes, then dangerously low fell over them, then sprinkled them with dry leaves. The scenery turned into a partner for the actors, and they themselves were reflected in their own way in very few objects on the stage, like children's toys taken from a hundred-year-old cupboard. Ranevskaya's plastic score, played by Strehler's actress Valentina Cortese, was based on rotation, and Gaev's top, launched by Gaev, rhymed with this movement, rotating for a minute and then somehow suddenly flying off its axis.

1981 Bouffe du Nord Theatre, Paris. Directed by Peter Brook

The Cherry Orchard by Peter Brook at the Bouffe du Nord Theatre. 1981© Nicolas Treatt / archivesnicolastreatt.net

In his lectures on the history of literature, Naum Berkovsky called subtext the language of enemies, and associated its appearance in drama with the changing relationships of people in the early 19th century. In The Cherry Orchard by Peter Brook, the characters have no enemies among each other. The director did not have them in the play either. And the subtext in Chekhov's work suddenly radically changed its quality, ceased to be a method of concealment, but, on the contrary, turned into a means of revealing to each other what cannot be conveyed with the help of words. Played out with little to no scenery (the walls and floor of the old Bouffe du Nord theater in Paris were covered with carpets), this performance was closely associated with post-war literature: “Chekhov writes extremely concisely, using a minimum of words, and his writing style is reminiscent of Pinter or Beckett Brook said in an interview. “For Chekhov, like for them, composition, rhythm, purely theatrical poetry of the only exact word, pronounced then and in the right way, plays a role.” Among the innumerable interpretations of The Cherry Orchard as a drama of the absurd that have arisen to this day, perhaps the most unusual thing about Brook's performance was precisely that, read through Beckett and Pinter, his Chekhov sounded in a new way, but remained himself.

2003 K. S. Stanislavsky International Foundation and Meno Fortas Theatre, Vilnius. Directed by Eymuntas Nyakroshus

The play "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus. Golden Mask Festival. Moscow, 2004

Yevgeny Mironov as Lopakhin in the play "The Cherry Orchard" by Eymuntas Nyakroshyus. Golden Mask Festival. Moscow, 2004 © Dmitry Korobeinikov / RIA Novosti

The first thing that the audience saw on the stage was the clothes of the inhabitants of the house thrown at each other, low columns standing behind, two hoops coming from nowhere: it seemed to be a manor, but as if reassembled from almost random objects. In this "Cherry Orchard" there were references to Strehler, but there was no trace of the poetry of the Italian Chekhov performance. However, Nyakroshyus's performance itself was built rather according to the laws of a poetic text. The six hours that he walked, the connections between things, gestures (as always with Nyakroshus, an unusually rich plastic score), sounds (like the unbearably loud cry of swallows) and music, unexpected animal parallels of the characters - these connections multiplied at an extraordinary speed, penetrating all levels . “A gloomy and magnificent bulk,” wrote theater critic Pavel Markov about Meyerhold’s The Inspector General, and this was the impression of the Lithuanian director’s performance, staged together with Moscow artists on the centenary of Chekhov’s
plays.

Eugene really doesn't like interviews: you never know how they shuffle questions in the newspaper, correct the meaning of what was said, making you look like an “idiot”. The accuracy of what was said is important for him: actions are behind the words. People are judged by their actions...

Here Myshkin can be judged by his actions. When he speaks, he explains his position. You can agree with him or not. But when Ganya hit his sister, he could have turned to the window, but he rushes to protect her. An act (without hesitation, without a doubt, its whole physics is in this!) immediately explains a person.

We spoke with Mironov in Vilnius, where Russian actors, gathered by the famous Lithuanian director Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, lived for three weeks to work on a new production of The Cherry Orchard, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Chekhov's play. Mironov has the role of Lopakhin. "New Russian" of the early twentieth century, which promises to cut down the garden...

Rehearsals from 10 am to 7 pm daily. But even at dinner at the hotel (with a restaurant on the lake), the conversation revolved around work. I myself witness how amazing Maksakova uttered several times a single phrase by Ranevskaya, while coloring it so intonation that the meaning changed completely each time. Mironov, according to the stories of the waitresses, could jump out from behind the table and portray something as Gaeva (Vladimir Ilyin), Firs (Alexey Petrenko) and Ranevskaya sitting next to him ...

- The Stanislavsky Foundation and the Nyakroshyus Theater are going to surprise Moscow with a new interpretation of The Cherry Orchard. How did you get into this show?

Nyakroshyus has never worked with Russian artists, so this is basically a discovery. He has always worked either with his troupe, which understands him from a glance, from the movement of an eyebrow, or with foreign troupes. And here is a Russian play and Russian artists. So the intrigue is doubly.

- Spectators, of course, are interested in such a contrast: where is Prince Myshkin - and where is the pragmatist Lopakhin! Did you have any doubts when you were offered the role of the merchant Lopakhin? Doesn't seem like your type?

Firstly, I do not recognize the role, although there is, of course, some kind of given by nature, which, I think, is important for cinema. For the theatre, these boundaries are absolutely superfluous. Secondly, I don’t understand how you can not experiment, having the opportunity. Thirdly, I don't know myself, my bar...

- Why did Nyakroshyus first bring the artists to Vilnius? Was it impossible to work immediately in Moscow?

It is very good that we have come off all our affairs, from the hustle and bustle of Moscow. We are all busy with only one thing from morning to evening. He raised the bar so high!

- And how do you like this: on the Internet, I accidentally came across an advertisement for the sale of the modern estate "Cherry Orchard" in the Moscow region with an area of ​​​​120 hectares for $ 1,200,000. Approximately as much, in terms of the current exchange rate, your hero paid at the auction, outbidding the Cherry Orchard from the merchant Deriganov...

Yes, they were surprised. Why is it called The Cherry Orchard? This is strange, because in principle there are no cherry orchards ... But if people have that kind of money, it means that not everything is so bad in Russia ...

- Speaking of money. They say that you were robbed during the filming of The Idiot, and Mashkov - Rogozhin, said that they stole from you, and not from him - because he was not in the role of Myshkin. How did it all happen?

At half past five in the morning, even a poorly sleeping person begins to fall asleep. So, in the morning in the NE compartment, I opened my eyes and saw the back of a man who was reaching into my wallet. When I said to him very quietly, “Stop!”, he suddenly gasped: “Sorry, for God’s sake!” - and rushed with great speed.

A friend was waiting for him in the corridor, they fled together. Volodya Mashkov jumped out of his compartment after them. Returning, he said: it seems they are from the dining car. But it was impossible to prove it, and they stole 300 dollars ... It’s just that the fact itself is offensive, although they stole a thousand from me. But then I saw the thief myself, so the sensations are disgusting ...

When will Muscovites get to the premiere?

From July 10 to July 14, on the stage of the Theater Center STD RF on Strastnoy, 8-a, the premiere of a new international project will take place - a performance based on the play by A.P. Chekhov "The Cherry Orchard".

The project is carried out by the International K. S. Stanislavsky Foundation and the Meno Fortas Theater (Lithuania) with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Committee for Culture of the Moscow Government.

Stage director - Eymuntas Nyakroshyus, artist - Nadezhda Gultyaeva.

Cast: Evgeny Mironov (Lopakhin), Lyudmila Maksakova (Ranevskaya), Vladimir Ilyin (Gaev), Alexey Petrenko (Firs), Inga Oboldina (Varya), Yulia Marchenko (Anya), Irina Apeksimova (Charlotte), Igor Gordin (Petya Trofimov), Ivan Agapov (Epikhodov), Sergey Pinegin (Simeonov-Pishchik), Anna Yanovskaya (Dunyasha), Alexander Zyblev (Yasha), Ilya Isaev (Passer-by), Yulia Svezhakova, Olga Chernook.

Parting
This "Cherry Orchard", going along with tragic, rather even funeral melodies (the main melody that sounds in the prologue and in the finale, and which I would call Fiers' melody - is somewhat consonant with the well-known Albinoni melody), is a farewell performance. Saying goodbye to the cherry orchard turns into saying goodbye to life. The performance is dedicated to the fundamental law of being - the finitude of all things, the finitude of life. Two pedestals, looming on the stage in the first two acts in full growth, and gone underground in the last two, are like grave monuments to someone's life. Like the weather vanes hanging in front of the backdrop, and never spun, what is it? - symbols of someone's past lives, or Kabbalistic signs? With a farewell, with a “burial”, the meeting with Ranevskaya begins - her Parisian life is over, her life in the cherry orchard is about to end, she lies on the couch like a dead woman, her face is covered with a black veil, her relatives and servants approach her, someone that, as if in a coffin, puts flowers on her chest.
The naive Petya is trying to say something about a new life, but the audience and listeners on stage greet his speeches with laughter, they know that EVERYTHING ends, including everything new, including life. Someone's end is someone's beginning, but Lopakhin and his beginning are not happy - the bitterness of loss overcomes the sweetness of novelty.

Nyakroshus
The director saturated the performance with so many metaphors and symbols that the performance resembles a supersaturated solution that simply dissolves, crushes the viewer, like a bird whistle and ringing in Lopakhin's ears, and in which some images (for example, an ax thrown from behind the scenes onto the stage at parting Ranevskaya and Gaeva behind the scenes with the people) are precipitated. Actors, even such magnificent ones as Mironov, Petrenko and others, are just notes in the theatrical “music” that Nyakroshus builds. Firs, this symbol of the Departing nature, in this "music" by Nyakroshus holds the melody of Farewell, like a bass drum, which the heroes drag from the 3rd to the 4th act, keeps the rhythm in the orchestra.

Ranevskaya
In the play, the age is indicated only for three characters - Anya, Varya, Firs. I saw performances with young beautiful Ranevskys, but they were about something else. Nyakroshus in his farewell performance needed just such Ranevskaya - lost, with a face like a squeezed lemon, and for her actress to play, who many, many years ago was a beauty (remember her irresistible Adelma in Princess Turandot) - like herself Lyubov Andreevna, and now ... she is reclining in a black coffin, excuse me, on a black couch, like a withered, withered flower. And this female beauty of the performer, which has gone into oblivion of time, which still flickers in the memory or subconscious of the viewer, is certainly used by the director as another color in his performance. A very strong characteristic of this Ranevskaya is the way she drinks coffee - straight from the coffee pot, tearing it out of the hands of a servant, the way neglected drug addicts take a dose. A worn out and worn out man.

Gaev
For me, this is one of the highlights of the play. Most of the characters in the play are sincere, like children. And in this kindergarten, the youngest “child” is Gaev, he is wearing some kind of kindergarten beret, and he lives, like a boy of 5-6 years old, in his own invented virtual world, where you can talk with a friend - a respected closet, and an old rotten garden cannot be cut down just because he saw it in a picture in an encyclopedia. Sharing and eating sweets with girls is the cutest and most touching scene of the play, and his phrase - “I am a man of the 80s” was simply met with applause, because all the spectators in the hall immediately remembered with their skin what “childish” games they played in 80s, followed immediately by the "adult" 90s. Gaev is in every person, as in everyone there is a child that he once was. “Yellow in the middle” is just a thin mask with which he covers himself and his world from “louts”. Gaev-Ilyin is not afraid to be sincere, his speeches, first of all, are extremely frank, devoid of pathos, he says in them what is essential for himself, it is a pity that these adults interrupt him all the time. But when he comes out to confess to the ramp, you see that this boy has an old man's face - bags under sad eyes, it is worn out by life almost to holes. I was shocked by his monologue from the 2nd act, which, unfortunately, they didn’t let him say to the end: “O nature, marvelous, you shine with eternal radiance, beautiful and indifferent, you, whom we call mother, combine being and death , you live and destroy...” For me, these penetrating words contain the quintessence of Nyakroshyus' play, a play about Being and Death.

The final
All the heroes say goodbye to each other, as they say goodbye, parting forever. "Farewell, Cherry Orchard! Goodbye Life! People go behind the weathercocks and sit down there. Firs comes out with a bunch of hay. “Gone! And they forgot me!” He takes out a bunch of green grass from the hay and chews it. “Life has passed, as if it had not lived! Oh, you are a fool!" These words are addressed to every inhabitant of the Cherry Orchard called Life. The backdrop is illuminated, all the characters have turned into bunnies (which they played in the 3rd act), only their white ears stick out, and the dead, motionless weathercocks are illuminated. Loud "billiard" claps-shots sound - the points of departure of little bunnies into oblivion. Everything is over. A curtain.