Рич, Элизабет Т. Том XXXIX, выпуск 4, осень 2000 г.
Михаил Козаков о пьесе Михаила Волохова «Килиманджаро на губах твоих». Он сравнивает её с «Кто боится Вирджинии Вульф?».
Как и почти все, с кем я разговаривал, Козаков озвучил часто слышимое сетование на то, что большинство пьес, написанных молодым поколением российских драматургов, «плохие» и «бездарные», что, по крайней мере, частично объясняет его предпочтение к постановке классики и западных пьес.
«Их диалоги поверхностны и им не хватает глубины; Это даже не интересно читать».
Единственное исключение, по мнению Козакова, — Михаил Волохов, чью пьесу «Килиманджаро на губах твоих» он сравнивает с «Кто боится Вирджинии Вульф?», только на другом социальном уровне.
«Когда молодые драматурги начнут хорошо писать, тогда мы их поставим. Но сейчас они плохо пишут и не владеют театральным искусством».
During recent trips to Moscow, in both 1998 and 1999, I had ample opportunity to see firsthand to what extent mass culture had seeped aggressively into every crevice of present-day Russian life. In the old Arbat region, for example, you could buy an «authentic» diploma for a hundred dollars; play the State «lotto» and instantly win up to ten thousand rubles (roughly $400); or sit in a sidewalk bistro like Taim-Aut (Time Out) and sip such exotic mixed drinks as Meksikanskaya smert’ (Mexican Death), Kholodnyj chaj dlinnogo ostrova (Long Island Ice Tea), Seks na plyazhe (Sex on the Beach), or Orgazm(Orgasm). But there were other telltale signs as well:Novye Russkie, the new Russians, sauntered down Moscow streets, sat in restaurants, and even stood in public rest rooms sporting cell phones. Women friends eagerly looked forward to watching the Russian television premiere of Disclosure, a film that, dubbed in Russian, with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore in lead roles, offers unprecedented subject matter (reverse sexual harassment) to what was until recently an extremely patriarchal society. The porter at Sheremetova Airport, who carried my bags across the terminal to Delta Airlines for five dollars, told me that he taught German in a Moscow middle school, but that his salary as a teacher was so abysmal he was forced to take a second job; while on the flight back to New York, a young, smartly dressed Russian woman seated next to me scarcely looked up from her book, Aleksandra Marinina’s latest best-selling thriller Posmertnyj obraz (Death Image), which is doing its part to help satisfy Russia’s growing appetite for home-grown crime fiction.
Against this backdrop, it seems odd that Russian classics, with Chekhov’s plays at the forefront, should continue to dominate the Russian stage; that they have not been upstaged by more modern mid- to lowbrow dramatic productions. True, a quick reading of last season’s theatrical programs will reveal such novelties, at least by former Soviet standards, as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s musical play The Threepenny Opera (Trekhgroshovaya Opera), whose spectacular Broadway-style production at the Satirikon Theater is reportedly the most expensive in the history of the Russian theater, with tickets only affordable to nouveau-riche Russians; Bjuro schast’ya (The Bureau of Happiness), which is touted as the «pervij Moskovsky mjuzikl,» or «Moscow’s first musical»; countless productions of Neil Simon’s plays, including Barefoot in the Park (Bosikom po parku), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (Poslednij pylko vlyublennij), and Biloxi Blues (Biloksi-bljuz); Jesus Christ—Superstar (Iisys Khristos—Syperzvezda), a musical based on the rock opera of the same name; as well as an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (Noch’ nezhna). But alongside them, with staggering frequency, there are dramatizations of Dostoevsky’s and Gogol’s novels, and plays by Nikolai Ostrovsky and Chekhov.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I knocked on the doors of leading Moscow theater directors. Why, I queried each in turn, do the classics continue to have appeal for a society so obviously infected by Western pop culture? And what in particular is Chekhov’s relevance and meaning for today’s audiences? The second question seemed appropriate, especially considering that the Moscow Art Theater (the theater made famous by Stanislavsky and his dramatic productions of Chekhov’s plays, including Chaika [The Seagull], Dyadya Vanya [Uncle Vanya], Tri sestry [Three Sisters], and Vishnevyj sad [The Cherry Orchard]) celebrated its one-hundred-year anniversary as recently as 1998.
Sergei Zhenovach
Sergei Zhenovach, a forty-one-year-old director who has received critical acclaim for his productions of such classics as Turgenev’s atmospheric psychological drama Mesyats v derevne (A Month in the Country) and Dostoevsky’s Idiot (The Idiot),[1] agreed to meet with me at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya. The theater, which was established fifty-two years ago, has no name per se; instead, it is called by the name of the street on which it is located—Malaya Bronnaya. Many of Russia’s most celebrated directors have worked in this theater, including Andrei Goncharov and Anatoly Efros, while Zhenovach, who began directing at the theater in 1992, became its chief artistic director in 1996. His tenure was relatively brief, though; in fact, when we sat down to discuss current trends in Russian drama in a basement enclave in June 1998, he had already decided not to renew his contract, thus making this literally one of his last appearances there.
Zhenovach has had a parallel career in pedagogy. For the last decade, he has been teaching a course in theater direction at his alma mater—the State Institute of Theatrical Arts (GITIS), now known as the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (RATI). Zhenovach, who works under the famed director-teacher Nikolai Fomenko at GITIS, is also a director at the Fomenko Theater Workshop, which is discussed in greater detail below.
For Zhenovach, a director who admittedly favors a classical repertoire, today’s unflagging interest in classics can be explained as a kind of figurative anchor for unsteady, complex times. «Now,» he began, «a time of quality has set in, and people want superior theater. Spectators are sick of being inundated with mediocre American films. In Russia we have our own rhythm, our own way of thinking. We are tired of a cliplike way of thinking—receiving a maximum amount of information in a minimum amount of time. Here the rhythm is more peaceful, internal, slow, more contemplative; you have lived here, so you know what I mean. That is, the Russian disposition is contemplative, spiritually contemplative. . . . In short, we are returning to the classics because the need has arisen in people for something eternal and steadfast; life is so shaky, so unstable, so unpredictable. Today there is one ruler; tomorrow there will be a different ruler. Now everything is changing so quickly; therefore, there is a desire to return to something pure, real and sincere—to candid feelings, to genuine passions. There are theaters that supposedly create box-office hits, but their success is short-lived. Today people have a desire for serious, deep, and unfussy things; this is felt every day.»
Zhenovach argues that the best Russian plays include several different ingredients: moments of entertainment, spirituality, and a profundity that grapples with such eternal questions as how to live in this world and what to believe in. «Russian theater has never been a superficial theater, although now many so-called directors are making that mistake. It seems to them that if they stage a play with several fashionable ditties and a few naked girls, they will fill up the house.» Zhenovach, on the other hand, tries to stage a play in such a way as to touch the «very soul» of his audience. «When I am staging a production, I think of ways to do it so that the individual remains an individual. It seems to me that theater, along with music, poetry, and literature, must constantly nurture feelings in the individual, so that we don’t yield to this crazy, insane twentieth century; so that we don’t become robots; so that a person remains a person.
«The classics make people feel peaceful today. They are harried; the rhythms of life are frantic and fast; and from this occurs the need for a certain internal comfort. Chekhov, for example, returns people to those fundamental feelings, when you begin to think about life, about yourself, about the world. Now people have become so estranged from one another; every person lives only for himself, thinking only of his own career and family. But the theater is a place where people unite, where people can connect with one another, and the feeling that comes from being together gives peace. I can watch a terrible tragedy; I can cry a great deal; I can be indignant at the unfairness in this life. Then, as I walk out of the theater, I realize that this was all a game, that this was theater. I wipe my tears; I listen to the silence of the night; I watch as the streetcars and buses go by, as people walk by. And suddenly I become warm; everything is good, peaceful. It can be the bloodiest, the most terrible, the cruelest play, but in the end it gives light—a feeling of peace, a feeling of goodness.»
And what about Chekhov? Do his plays continue to delight the Russian audience today as much as they have for the past century? And are directors still keen to stage them? «Chekhov has always been a part of our lives,» Zhenovach remarks, «and there is not a theatrical season that goes by that does not offer stage productions of his plays. We have always staged a great deal of Chekhov.» But if there is a new trend to speak of, says Zhenovach, it would be the proclivity toward the early writing of Chekhov. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, for example, Ivanov, Chekhov’s first full-length play, was staged at the Gogol Dramatic Theater and the Taganka Theater; Leshii (The Wood Demon), Chekhov’s second full-length play, at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya; Platonov, a play from Chekhov’s early period that remained unpublished until the 1920s and unperformed until the 1950s,[2] at the Moscow Chekhov Art Theater; Strasti po Antoshe (Passions According to Anton), which features Chekhov’s early vaudeville Medved’ (The Bear), at the Moscow Gorky Art Theater; Tatiana Repina—a sketch by Chekhov written early in his career that is virtually unknown to present-day Muscovites—at the Young Spectators’ Theater; and Svad’ba (The Wedding), another early vaudeville, at the Fomenko Theater Workshop.
In 1994, at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, Zhenovach also produced The Wood Demon—a play that, to his mind, has been «undeservedly» and «unfairly» forgotten. He rightly argues that while «everyone knows Uncle Vanya,» The Wood Demon (panned by most critics as a weak precursor to Uncle Vanya) is not well known and is rarely staged. «But The Wood Demon does not at all resemble Uncle Vanya,» he told me. «In fact, it is perhaps the only play by Chekhov that does not conclude with departures, deaths, and suicides, but with weddings. It is a comedy that is amusing, interesting, and deep.» But there is another reason, no less compelling, that directors like Zhenovach are turning to the early writings of Chekhov. «Chekhov’s mature plays,» Zhenovach admitted, «have been overstaged. They have played for such a long time that all theatrical people know them by heart.» In fact, he says, it was not that long ago that eight different Moscow theaters were offering their own productions of Three Sisters, which meant in one evening as many as «eight pairs of sisters suffering and wanting to go to Moscow.» Therefore, the current «celebration of the early Chekhov» (Zhenovach’s words) can be explained, at least in part, as a «breather» from his mature plays.
Like everything in a commercial market, where the pursuit of liberty is secondary to the pursuit of money, where the profit motive dominates, and where exploitation and exploiters are given unbridled rein, Chekhov, too, has fallen prey to a certain degree of opportunism. «There is a prevailing opinion that when you stage Chekhov,» Zhenovach told me, «it will become a calling card for you, and you will be discovered by the whole world. Still, I don’t think that there are directors today in Russia who are staging Chekhov only in the hopes of taking the production to Broadway; rather, they are staging Chekhov because there is an internal need for them to do so—the texts excite them and they like to pronounce these words. To live in the theater and not stage Chekhov—this means not understanding anything.» Chekhov is also being staged by default; young dramatists simply cannot compete with him. «If there were a contemporary play that I liked, that aroused a comparable feeling,» Zhenovach emphatically declared, «I would stage it immediately. But unfortunately no names come to mind. Therefore, I am better off staging Chekhov, Ostrovsky, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill than staging a bad text and a bad dramatist. There are interesting works today, but they cannot compete with Chekhov. I would be better off working three or four months on a play by Chekhov than on a play that is little more than an imitation of Chekhov. No, there are no new splashes in dramaturgy; there are no new names.» It was here that Zhenovach made mention of the fact that he serves on a jury that every year selects the best debut of a dramatist, a director, an actor, a choreographer, a ballerina, and an opera singer. In 1997, he told me, the jury elected to give the prize for the best debut in dramaturgy to Olga Mukhina, while in 1998 it did not give it to anyone, since there were «only two debuts. . . . In a year there were no new names,» he lamented. «This is a fact. . . . Now we are waiting for the discovery of new names.
«Today contemporary dramaturgy exists, and while it is not the very worst dramaturgy, it unfortunately does not exert influence on the thoughts of people. This is a tragedy; this is the misfortune of contemporary drama—that the young dramatists write a great deal, that sometimes they are staged, but that they do not appear as masters of thought; they do not excite. How do I put it . . . when they prepare a dish, everyone eats it, and tomorrow there will be a new dish, and we have already forgotten about the first dish. But we cannot forget about Chekhov; we cannot forget about Ostrovsky; we cannot forget about Eugene O’Neill. We rethink them every year. But these new plays . . . For example, Nadezhda Ptushkina’s Ovechka [a play that combines eroticism with the biblical story of Jacob and Rachel] will not stand the test of time. Some interesting works have appeared, but they are not turning points; they are not events.»
At this point, Zhenovach nodded at the heaps of manuscripts lying on the desk in front of him—the manuscripts of young hopefuls. «There is a torrent of manuscripts here; perhaps as many as a hundred. . . . You know, I really want to discover a new, interesting author, but so far I can’t find one; I don’t see any talent here. None of this is my cup of tea.»
Petr Fomenko
I met with the sixty-eight-year-old Petr Fomenko, one of Russia’s leading theater directors,[3] in the department for drama directors at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (RATI), where he began teaching in 1981. On the walls behind its imposing, stately staircase in the foyer hung portraits of Russia’s theatrical giants: Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Since I arrived a little earlier than our designated meeting time, I headed for the café below the stairwell, where I saw Fomenko warmly greeting his students; the rapport between teacher and students was unmistakable.
Upstairs, a few minutes later, Fomenko invited me to sit in on the first-year class, where students were producing a number of «improvisation performances» based on various stories by Gogol, including Portret (The Portrait), Starosvetskie pomeshchiki (Old-Fashioned Farmers), Majskaya noch’ (A May Night), Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom (The Night of Christmas Eve), Viy (The Viy), and scenes from his novel Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls). «Taking the impetus from Gogol,» Fomenko explained, «students use this exercise as a springboard for their own imagination and reflections.» This was only a trial run, though; the students, after having their work critiqued by Fomenko, were to repeat this practical exercise in ten days for the entire theater faculty; at that time, they would also receive a grade for their work.
Despite the fact that he received the 1997 State Prize for creating the Fomenko Theater Workshop (Masterskaya P. Fomenko), a professional theater originally composed of actors and directors who trained under Fomenko and graduated from the State Institute of Theatrical Arts (GITIS) in 1993,[4] and the fact that he is commonly hailed as Moscow’s top director of the 1990s, Fomenko was refreshingly jocular and self-effacing. When I asked him to say a few words about himself, he replied, «I’m a crazy person from the city; otherwise, I never would have been able to survive in the theater.»
In contrast to Zhenovach, who attributes today’s interest in classics as a «figurative anchor for unsteady times,» Fomenko sees it as an expression of newfound artistic freedom. «We are very glad that we can stage a number of classics today, that [a theater’s choice of repertory] is no longer a political act. For several decades we were forced to stage contemporary official political drama; it had to have an ideological orientation. I managed to stage plays before perestroika, but it was very difficult. There were ideologues; there was terrible censorship. Of the thirty plays I tried to stage, they closed ten of them. It is only about ten years ago that we acquired the freedom to choose our own repertoire, and many threw themselves into the classics.» Here Fomenko was no exception, judging by the active repertoire of the Fomenko Theater Workshop, which includes, among others: Gogol’s Vladimir III stepeni (The Order of St. Vladimir, directed by Sergei Zhenovach), which combines early dramatic fragments from the writings of Nikolai Gogol; Turgenev’s Mesyats v derevne (A Month in the Country, also directed by Zhenovach); Nikolai Ostrovsky’s Volki i ovtsy (Wolves and Sheep, directed by Fomenko); and Chichikov. Mertvye dushi. Tom vtoroj. (Dead Souls—II, or Chichikov’s New Adventures, also directed by Fomenko), which is based on the second volume of Gogol’s Dead Souls. As for Chekhov, Fomenko stages only his early vaudevilles,[5] such as The Wedding, which was presented in 1998 at the Third International Chekhov Theater Festival in Moscow; several years ago, at the institute, he staged Platonov (A Play without a Title), which has only recently become popular among other Russian directors. «I am already old,» he told me, «and I love the classics.»
Yet he and Zhenovach are in complete agreement on another point: with freedom comes excess and abuse, to which not even the hallowed Chekhov is immune. «On the one hand, there is an internal artistic need to stage Chekhov,» explained Fomenko. «On the other hand, there are mercenary considerations. From frequent use, Chekhov’s great plays verge on banality; if you do the same thing over and over, then you face the danger, if not of triviality, then in any case of dulling the feeling. They stage The Seagull in droves . . . it’s a nightmare, but what can you do? Although there is an effort to stage Chekhov in an avant-garde way, it is simply like a dried-up herbarium. As for mercenary considerations . . . there was a period when Chekhov was of great interest to the West, to America and Europe. Chekhov is easily understood by the West; the Russian painful, beautiful, and symbolic feeling of the passing of life is also at the same time radiant melancholy. And then there is the Moscow Art Theater,[6] which defined twentieth-century theater with a number of Chekhov’s intonational patterns. So many directors who wanted to go to the West would stage Chekhov in the hopes of getting an invitation to go there. This is boring for me; this is uninteresting.»
According to Fomenko, it is precisely Tennessee Williams’s «closeness» to Chekhov that makes him so appealing to Russian directors. «You have already passed through that period when Williams was staged a great deal, but it is only now that we are able to stage him in Russian[7]. . . . Williams is a truly extraordinary playwright . . . he is subtle, morbid, and he talks about each individual separately—about his disorders, his psyche, his physiology.» In fact, Fomenko regards Williams as a better playwright than Chekhov.
As for the current role of young dramatists, directors, and actors, Fomenko was far from pessimistic. «Things are not nearly as tragic as people may have told you. We have talented people; there are remarkable young dramatists. There was a period when we walked away from new young dramatists. But it has already passed; I am positive of this. Now there are a number of young dramatists, especially women.[8] Now we feel an interest and need for finding and staging our young Russian dramatists. There has been a turn toward this, and this tendency can really be felt. . . . Our theater will not perish; it will live on. The critics have already buried Russian theater; they have already sung ‘Halleluia’ to it. But it has survived, thank God.»
Vladimir Mirzoev
I met with the forty-three-year-old Vladimir Mirzoev, one of the most respected names in the middle generation of directors, at the Stanislavsky Theater on Tverskaya Street (formerly Gorky Street). Born in Moscow, Mirzoev graduated in 1981 from the State Institute of Theatrical Arts (GITIS), and spent five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s living in Toronto, Canada, where he had his own theatrical company, The Horizontal Eight. In 1993, when he began working in Moscow again, he directed a succession of plays at the Stanislavsky Theater, including Gogol’s Zhenitba (The Marriage); Khlestakov, an adaptation of Gogol’s play Revizor (The Inspector General) for which Mirzoev was nominated for the State Prize as best director; and most recently, Shakespeare’s Ukroshchenie stroptivoj (The Taming of the Shrew) and Dvenadtsataya noch’ (Twelfth Night). According to Mirzoev, numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays is a «phenomenon of the last two theatrical seasons.»[9] «Before perestroika,» he explained, «there was very little Shakespeare in Moscow. Because they deal with the problem of power, Shakespeare’s Shotlandskaya p’esa (the Scottish play) was banned and Gamlet (Hamlet) was not among those plays recommended for production.» Mirzoev also has staged Molière’s Amphitryon (Amphitrion) at the Vakhtangov Theater and Turgenev’s Dve zhenshchiny (Two Women) at Lenkom.
As this list suggests, Mirzoev favors a classical repertoire—a choice dictated more by necessity and the times than personal inclination. «Today’s theater audience is searching for some kind of support in culture,» he explained. «They are searching for the possibility of leaning on some kind of cultural canon—a canon that will give them the feeling of stability in their lives, which today is very unstable.» It is for this reason that Mirzoev is unable to pursue his penchant for the more avant-garde. Although he regards postmodernist approaches to a text as «interesting,» he now finds himself dependent on the harsh realities of a «cash register» and «on whether or not [he] can fill a theater with spectators. . . . Naturally we find ourselves in a situation where it is difficult to stage avant-garde, modernistic drama. For example, I cannot permit myself to stage Beckett or Pinter on a big stage today.
«Therefore, it is necessary to stage a classical play—a play that has multiple layers, one of which can be fully understood by any audience.» Here Mirzoev mentioned Molière’s Amphitryon, whose plot is based on the legend of Alcmene, who becomes pregnant by Zeus disguised as her husband, Amphitryon. According to Mirzoev, the play not only has all the ingredients of a typical comedy (a clear plot, comedic confusion, amusing situations) and appeal for the most unenlightened audience, but it also includes more sophisticated layers of the philosophical, the metaphysical, and the poetic.
However, Mirzoev, who staged two of Chekhov’s vaudevilles (The Bear and Predlozhenie [The Proposal]) when he worked in Canada, would refrain from staging a Chekhov play in Moscow now. «Everyone is tired of him,» he said, shrugging. «There is not only a weariness from the public and directors, but there is also a weariness of the texts. If you stage a text many times—stage it intensively for ten years in a row—then the magic disappears. It’s like a well . . . you need to give it time until it fills up with water again. That about sums up our attitude toward Chekhov today.»
Nor does the well-known Chekhovian absence of plot particularly suit today’s Russian audience; in fact, according to Mirzoev, it is regarded by most as a negative facet in dramaturgy. «What is plot?» Mirzoev posed the question. «Plot is the equivalent to fate, to the understanding of fate. If the plot in a work is like a spinal column, then it is synonymous to a person’s fate in real life. Now we live at a time when Russian society is fumbling with a new political, ideological, and economic structure, and this absence of a spinal cord or backbone in the country is perceived by everyone as a misfortune, as a strange negative quality. Therefore, Russian people today are searching for a plot construction in any work they come across. As soon as they find it, they immediately breathe more easily; they have the feeling that there is ‘fate’ in the work, which they so desperately need. In short, a plotless form today is impossible to any great extent; it is perceived as a shortcoming, as a loss that hinders us, and it is pushed away.» Mirzoev knows this to be true from personal experience; in 1998, when he staged two contemporay «plotless» plays (Aleksei Kazantsev’s Tot eto svet [This Is That Light] and Mikhail Ugarov’s Golubi [Doves]) on the malaya stsena, or small stage, at the Stanislavsky Theater, «the public by no means came running.»
Oleg Tabakov
I met with the sixty-four-year-old actor-director Oleg Tabakov at the Theater-Studio bearing his name, where he is both founder and artistic director. As a sign of the sociopolitical changes taking place in Soviet life in the mid-1980s, it was one of three theater-studios established in 1986, and now boasts one of the strongest troupes in Moscow in the twenty- to forty-year-old age category. «Our theater,» Tabakov told me proudly, «is a small branch of the family tree called the Moscow Art Theater, a studio-theater which arose from the bosom of that structure.» The Tabakov Theater-Studio is also one of the most popular theaters in Moscow today, as evidenced by the fact that its productions always pack the hall, even though its tickets are among the most expensive for dramatic theaters in Moscow.
But Tabakov brings a great deal of experience to the job. A celebrated theater and movie actor in Russia, whom audiences have seen in more than 150 roles at the Sovremennik (Contemporary) and Moscow Art Theater, Tabakov is also well known in the West for film roles such as Oblomov in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Neskol’ko dnej iz zhizni I.I. Oblomova (Several Days in the Life of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov) and Pyotr Rostov in Voina i mir (War and Peace). His fame in the pre-perestroika era was so great, in fact, that «it surpassed that of the first secretary or a member of the politburo for the Soviet people» (Tabakov’s words).
After graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School (class of Vasily Toporkov, Stanislavsky’s original company member), Tabakov in 1957 joined forces with Oleg Efremov and a number of his fellow graduates to form the Sovremennik Theater. Then, in 1971, at the astonishingly young age of thirty-five, he began a five-year stint as producing director of the Sovremennik Theater—a position for which he was uniquely qualified, given his heavy-handed Napoleonic approach to and philosophy of theater management, which he sums up as follows: «Democracy is absurd in the theater, akin to pathology; because an actor is not capable of thinking about others; an actor thinks only about himself. His view of the world can only materialize through the prism of his own navel.» So when Tabakov, as a parting gift, handed me a collagelike poster featuring pictures of himself as a baby and in various acting roles from his adult life, including Oblomov, I was not in the least surprised. After all, Tabakov was also an accomplished actor who, by his own admission, «thinks only about himself.»
It is no less noteworthy that, since the mid-1970s, Tabakov has been engaged in teaching future actors—first at the State Institute of Theatrical Arts (GITIS) and then at the Moscow Art Theater School, where he was named head in 1986. He trained an entire generation of actors who are now successfully working in various Moscow theaters, and the nucleus of his own company is made up of his students. Oleg Tabakov also heads the Stanislavsky Summer School in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[10] which he cofounded with a group of leading Moscow drama teachers and actors, and supervises the international postgraduate course in acting run by the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Supporting the view that the theater is only a place «for enlightened absolutism,» Tabakov alone determines the repertory, his sole criterion being «the giftedness of a literary work» and whether or not it will «reveal new possibilities for [his] artists.»»The augmentation of my artists’ skills,» he told me, «is fifty percent of my concern. That is, securing their growth, their development.» To this end, he has put together a repertory that appeals to a wide spectrum of tastes: foreign plays, including Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn, James Miller’s Chempiony (That Championship Season), and Tennessee Williams’s Staryi kvartal (Small Craft Warnings); classical drama, such as Ostrovsky’s Na vsyakogo mudretsa dovol’no prostoty (The Diary of a Scoundrel), Gorky’s Poslednie (The Last People), and Turgenev’s Zavtrak u predvoditelya (Lunch with the Marshal of the Nobility); avant-garde Western plays, including the psychological sketch Iskusstvo (Art) by Yasmina Reza, a popular French playwright; and plays by contemporary Russian playwrights, including Strasti po Bumbarashu (Passions according to Bumbarash) by Julij Kim and Dyra (The Hole) by Aleksandr Galin.
Unlike the majority of his colleagues, who continue to view theater in idealistic terms, outside the parameters of monetary considerations, Tabakov knows the value of a ruble and could easily rival our most aggressive businessmen in the art of making money. «I know what a commercial market is,» he told me. «I began making money in 1974, when I started staging plays in Europe. Therefore, I was better prepared for the changes that took place in 1991. Most of my colleagues float along the stream like stupid logs and are still trying to turn attention to the fact that no one helps them. If a river flows and falls into the sea, then the log will fall into the sea. Or the log must begin to taxi and pull into the shore. . . . It’s not that I’ve been lucky; I work and secure a level of demand for my production.»
Although Tabakov received many awards for artistic excellence in the former Soviet Union, including the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union and USSR State Prize for the Arts, it is only in the last decade that he has come to know the meaning of the term «human dignity.» «Not for anything would I say that I wanted to return to my former way of life. Because in these last ten years no one has dared to tell me what I must stage—which play, which author, for which holiday.»
But for all his business acumen, Tabakov is the first to put Chekhov on a pedestal for his humanistic qualities. «Chekhov,» he declared, «was one of the most cultured people in the world’s evolution. A thoughtful man in the Russian sense of the word . . . not an ‘intellectual’ who possesses a master’s or baccalaureate degree, but a thoughful man who helps those people who live worse than he does.» Small wonder, then, that his future plans include a new production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. «I think about my spectator; I think about his growth. I must educate him; I must pull the spectator up to my level.» Then, in an appropriately Chekovian vein, he added, «I think that the soul of my spectator must work and exert itself; I give concrete tasks for this.»
Tabakov is also expert in the Stanislavsky method[11]—a method that he refers to as his «aesthetic faith»; in fact, in 1998 he received the State Prize for his role in developing the ideas of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. «The Stanislavsky method,» he declared flatly, «is the method of the best theatrical practitioners today. Nothing more, nothing less.»
On the basis of his own observations, Tabakov is less than enthusiastic about American productions of Chekhov’s plays. «A significant number of productions of Chekhov’s plays in American theater are bad; at least that was the case with the ones I saw. Bad from the point of view of their implementation of action on the stage. If you give me bread not baked thoroughly all the time, then I will tell you that this is not bread, but shit. . . . The concept of action—this is a difficult concept that requires serious discussion. For you, action is one thing; in my understanding, action is altogether different. To my mind, the most action-packed American films are Citizen Kane and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I say this as a spectator; I am not a critic.»
In June 2000, with the passing of Oleg Efremov, Tabakov was named the new artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater.
Roman Viktyuk
Roman Viktyuk, director of one of Russia’s first private theaters (The Roman Viktyuk Theater),[12] invited me to meet him at the site of his new theater, which was then under reconstruction. A cross between Elton John and Liberace, with his blue glasses, flamboyantly bright plaid shirt and pants, and bleached blond hair, Viktyuk skirted my question as to how old he is,[13] telling me instead that he «has only just begun to live.»
The theater, Viktyuk told me proudly, would be constructed in such a way so as to reflect the ongoing trend toward experimentation with complex spatial arrangement of the stage, a trend that first manifested itself at the beginning of the 1990s; in fact, the theater would not even hold a traditional stage. «Between the stage and the hall,» he explained, «there will not be a barrier; there will not be any elevation; everything will be, as it were, in one structure. We must return all of this to the condition of complete ruin. The Soviet authorities closed all the windows, so everything here will be completely open . . . there will be rocks, bricks, pipes and water. Everything will be like in a primeval condition.»
To complement the structure of this theater, Viktyuk features a repertory that is unorthodox and often erotic. It includes, among others, Marina Tsvetaeva’s Fedra; an adaptation of Feodor Sologub’s Melkij Bes (The Petty Demon); Jean Genet’s one-act drama Les Bonnes (The Maids); Oscar Wilde’s Solomeya (Salome; 1892), a one-act drama that was originally banned in England but produced in France; David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, winner of the 1988 Tony and the Drama Desk New Play award; and a dramatization of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Viktyuk was also making plans to take his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the stage. In Viktyuk’s version, which is set at an all-men’s college in England, four students decide to stage Romeo and Juliet. «Since there are no women at this college,» Viktyuk told me, giving the rationale for an all-male cast, «the boys have no choice but to distribute all the roles among themselves. But they don’t change into women’s clothes; there’s none of that. In this way, we see what transpires with them and how love arises.» According to Viktyuk, love is the «only commandment of nature,» but «no one teaches love.»
Although the repertoire clearly reflects and touches upon the most urgent problems of society, it is above all for his triumphs in shattering the taboo against homoeroticism that Viktyuk is well known (or more precisely put, infamous) to the Russian public. «The Soviet Union always maintained,» he explained, «that there is only one means of love and one form of human intercourse. They forgot that [sexual orientation] was given by nature, which is something that the theater must reflect. Therefore, we were the first to stage a play about female love [lesbianism], about male love [homosexuality], about pedophiles. We tried to stage everything that had been closed to society, everything that had been formerly under prohibition and for which people were given a prison term.» A good example is his dramatization of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir, which has been described as «a parade of androgynous figures strapped with erect phalluses [who] ‘teach’ a virgin the joys of sex through rape and then, apparently, the killing of her mother.»[14]
Given his theatrical oeuvre—his staging of plays treating the theme of homosexuality, which until the early 1990s was regarded as aberrant behavior by Russian authorities—as well as his avowed independence from any political party, it hardly seems surprising that Viktyuk receives no official monetary support. «We do exactly what we want,» he told me.
At this point, Viktyuk launched into a lengthy digression about Russian culture, in order to put his approach to theater in the proper context. «Russian culture has always grappled with two questions: ‘What is to be done?’ and ‘Who is guilty?’ When all of society understands that it is impossible to solve these questions, we will grasp the fact that art, above all, is enjoyment. It is mutual joy both for the theater and for the spectators who come, which represents a completely different world outlook for Russians. The legacy that has been given to us is suffering and pain, and we are constantly in this state. There has never been in Russian history a period when joy was the property of an individual.»
Small wonder, then, that Viktyuk’s 1988 production of The Cherry Orchard at the Mono Theater in Moscow did not follow the traditional path of Stanislavsky. «Like everything I do,» he said, smiling, «it was not performed in the usual way.» In fact, aside from the actor who played the role of the old servant, Firs, the rest of the cast was composed of adolescents between the ages of twelve and fifteen. «This seemed like the correct way to do it,» he explained, «because Chekhov always considered his plays to be comedies. But other theaters in Moscow always play them as dramas and tragedies.»
Still, Viktyuk maintains that there is limited interest today in seeing a production of a Chekhov play. «Go and see,» he insisted, «how many people are sitting in the audience at the Moscow Art Theater to watch their production of Three Sisters. The bulk of the audience are children brought from school, fifth graders and older children.»
To more dramatically prove his point, Viktyuk turned to the young actors, Lesha and Oleg, sitting beside him. «Here young people are sitting. Ask them when was the last time they saw a play by Chekhov. Lesha, when was the last time you saw a play by Chekhov? Did you hear—in childhood! Oleg, when was the last time you saw a play by Chekhov? Did you hear—a hundred years ago!»
Mikhail Kozakov
I met with the sixty-five-year-old Mikhail [Misha] Kozakov at his apartment, which was filled with photographs and other mementos attesting to Kozakov’s acting achievements and friendships with international celebrities: a photograph of him and Robert De Niro, with whom he became friends in the early 1980s when the latter came to Russia—a time when almost no one, even the artistic community, knew who De Niro was; a note from De Niro thanking Kozakov for his «hospitality» in Moscow and signing it with «love»; a letter sent to Kozakov from Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Prize-winner for literature and 1991-1992 U.S. poet laureate; a tattered copy of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which had on its title page a dedication inscribed to Kozakov from the playwright himself. Dated November 17, 1963 (Moscow), the dedication reveals Albee’s admiration for Kozakov’s theatrical prowess. «For Misha,» it begins, «who will, I hope, play the part of ‘George’ in this play in Moscow. While he is, at the moment, too young in age [he was then twenty-nine], I’m sure his acting ability will allow him to.»
Kozakov’s apartment was also a shrine to former acting roles and recent pet projects that reflect his literary affinities. On the wall, there was a photograph of Robert Penn Warren (calling it «one of his favorite television roles,» Kozakov had the lead as Jack Burden in a Russian film based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men); a photograph of Joseph Brodsky, whose poetry Kozakov recites on CD, currently for sale; and a large bust of Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, by the window. Pushkin also wrote such tales as Pikovaya dama (The Queen of Spades, 1833),which is now available on CD, with Kozakov as its narrator. «Brodsky is the main poet of the twentieth century for me,» he told me, «the same way Pushkin is the principal poet of the nineteenth century. Brodsky is my idol, a deity, who has exerted a very substantial influence on my life. I always compare my own views with his views on art, on religion, and so on. So for the last thirty years, Brodsky has controlled me, without slackening. As for Pushkin, he of course is above everyone else, which is the view almost every Russian has about him.»
A brilliant film and stage actor whose roles have run the gamut from Hamlet and Shylock to Don Juan (Molière’s comedy Don Juan) to Faust to Cyrano de Bergerac, Kozakov refused to allow our conversation to become dry or tedious; instead, with perfect dramatic timing, he first played the tape of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, in which his voice, at an almost deafening pitch, resounded throughout the apartment; then he played the disk of himself reciting Brodsky’s poetry; and finally, in Gene Kelly-like fashion, he did a vigorous and graceful dance routine to an old Bing Crosby song as we said our good-byes. It was then that I recalled a detail mentioned early on in our conversation: before enrolling in 1952 at the theater-studio of the Moscow Art Theater to pursue an acting career, Kozakov had studied dance.
Kozakov’s more recent biography literally, if not figuratively, includes a journey to «the promised land.» In 1991, he, his wife, and then two-year-old son left Russia to live in Israel, a move prompted by both economic and political factors. «Life was very difficult here at the end of the eighties; the shelves were empty and there was nothing to buy in the stores. I remember having to bring back from America a vacuum cleaner, an iron, baby food for my little boy. On the economic front, this all really irritated me.» There were also «signs of fascism» emerging in Russia at that time, which represented a threat to both Kozakov, whose father was Jewish, and his wife, both of whose parents were Jewish. «I was fed up with all of this,» he declared.
In Israel, Kozakov was invited to perform in Hebrew at the State Theater. «They invited me to play the role of Trigorin in Chekhov’s The Seagull in Hebrew, but I didn’t know a single word of the language. Still, I managed to learn the role in four months.» Later, he staged private productions in Russian, which toured not only in Israel, but in his former homeland as well.
In the mid-1990s, Kozakov returned to Russia to live, and began once again to stage productions. His repertoire, which must be both commercially viable and to his liking, includes such plays as Noel Coward’s comedy An Improbable Farce and Bernard Slade’s Tribute. «I produce plays which our spectators don’t know,» he told me. «This is not the only principle, but it certainly makes things more interesting.»
As the proprietor of a private theatrical enterprise, or what is called in Russian antrepriza, Kozakov does not have his own theater; instead, when he stages a production, he rents a theater with his own money. He also pays his actors roughly ten times as much as those working at the Moscow Art Theater. «I invest thousands of dollars in these projects; it’s my risk and sometimes I win and sometimes I lose; no one helps me; it’s only my wife and me. We are not rich people, we are not millionaires; we simply take out a loan with interest. That’s how it goes; there’s no sponsor, no help from the government, no help from Israel, no help from Russia, no help from America, no help from New Zealand.» Kozakov also has to contend with «fierce competition,» which represents a new concept for Russian directors. «Before there was no choice. But now—you can buy cassettes, you can buy books, you can build a house. Another era has come.»
Both as an actor and a director, Kozakov scrupulously follows the Stanislavsky method. «When I explain to my actors how to play a role, they sometimes look at me with such admiration. I say, ‘What are you admiring? This is all from Stanislavsky. I am only reminding you about everything that Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko taught’. . . . If you are producing a psychological play, you can’t escape the Stanislavsky method. You need to live, to act, to perform each play as though it were for the first time—today, now, this minute. You can’t pretend. . . . Without the Stanislavsky method, this is impossible. Stanislavsky summed up all the best that came before him and simply substantiated it; he more or less discovered laws in our empirical business.» Therefore, when Kozakov takes on a serious role, he makes a point of studying everything about the character he is playing. «If it is a role of past centuries, I study the biography of the characters, I go to museums, I try to get a feel for the role.»
According to Kozakov, whose favorite American directors include Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese in his best films, the theater of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko (the Moscow Art Theater) was the first serious directors’ theater in Russia. «From ingenious dilettantism, Stanislavsky turned directing into a profession. He proved; he formulated. He gave us terms; he gave us the basis of these terms; he thought up exercises. Then came its development. . . . Everyone picks from this system; it doesn’t mean that you have to read the textbooks of Stanislavsky day and night. No, but you need to sometimes open them and remember their essential principles.» As for the current role of the Moscow Art Theater, which until recently was under the management of his former teacher, the late Oleg Efremov, Kozakov told me, not without regret, that «the theater has deteriorated,» that «the actors are in a terrible state,» and that «it is now a bad theater.» «Although there are a few good individual actors, the quality of the troupe as a whole is poor. And there is no general style or ideas, only words that make declarations about life and the human spirit, which are so hopelessly dated. One of the main postulates underlying the Stanislavsky system is the feeling of contemporary life, but Efremov does not at all feel contemporaneity.»
To Kozakov’s mind, acting schools in today’s Russia are also going through a «slump.» «There are all kinds of reasons why this is happening, economic and political. Young actors say, ‘If no one needs this, why should I torment myself? I’d be better off going into television, where they pay more money.’ Good pedagogues have also stopped teaching. Many have died, others don’t go into this profession because it pays so little.» But, says Kozakov, if there is hope for the future, it rests with people like Fomenko who «continues tradition» with his young actors.
Like almost everyone else I spoke with, Kozakov gave voice to the often heard lament that the majority of plays written by the young generation of Russian dramatists are «bad» and «without talent,» which at least partially explains his preferance for staging classics and Western plays. «Their dialogue is superficial and lacks depth; it’s not even interesting to read it.» The one exception, according to Kozakov, is Mikhail Volokhov, whose play Kilimandzharo na gubakh tvoikh (Kilimanjaro on Your Lips)[15] he compares to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only on a different social level. «When the young dramatists start writing well, then we will stage them. But now they write poorly and don’t possess the art of theater.»
When I asked Kozakov who his favorite dramatist was, he gave a rather extensive list: Shakespeare, Molière, Arthur Miller, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch, Edward Albee. Curiously, though, his affinity for Chekhov was more circumscribed: «I really love The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, but I don’t especially like The Cherry Orchard and I hate Ivanov and Platonov. In general, Chekhov is not my favorite dramatist.» In fact, he even goes so far as to attribute Chekhov’s international popularity to his accessibility and what he regards as «an absence of great dramaturgy in the twentieth century»: «Dürrenmatt is already too intellectual for, say, the people in Turkey, but Chekhov is just right.»
As for the future of Russian theater, Kozakov summed up his thoughts: «I don’t have the slightest idea,» he said, shrugging. «I’ve thought about it and I can’t find an answer.»
NOTES
1. Zhenovach’s production of A Month in the Country was one of four productions to represent the Fomenko Theater Workshop at the 1997 International Theater Festival in Avignon, France. For his adaptation of The Idiot, which was staged as a trilogy over the course of three evenings at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, Zhenovach was awarded the top national theater award, the Golden Mask, as the best director in 1996.
2. Useful background information about Platonov is given in Richard Gilman’s Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity. «In 1923,» Gilman writes, «the untitled manuscript of a hitherto unknown play by Chekhov turned up in an old desk in Moscow. It was soon published as A Play without a Title in Four Acts, and later a great deal was learned about its provenance. According to Chekhov’s brother, Mikhail, who after Anton’s death edited a collection of his letters, he had written the play ‘while a student’ in Moscow, which suggests 1881 or 1882 as the year of composition, a time when he had already begun to contribute sketches to humor magazines while he was working toward his medical degree. . . . It wasn’t until some thirty years after its discovery that it had its first production, when in 1954 a version was done in Stockholm, an English translation of the Swedish title being Poor Don Juan. Since then it has appeared in various venues and, drastically shortened and almost always wretchedly ‘adapted,’ under a variety of names: A Provincial Don Juan; Don Juan in the Russian Manner; A Country Scandal; Without Patrimony (or Without Fathers); and Wild Honey—and has been published in its entirety in a workmanlike English translation by the indefatigable David Magarshack, who called it Platonov, the name of its central character, the Don Juan of all those other titles.» See Richard Gilman, Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 45-46.
3. Among his best-known productions are The Investigation by Peter Weiss at the Taganka Theater (1967), This Dear Old House by Arbuzov, La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu by Jean Giraudoux at the Theater of Comedy (1973), The Fruits of Enlightenment by Leo Tolstoy at the Mayakovsky Theater (1985), The Case by Sukhovo-Kobylin at the Vakhtangov Theater (1989), Albert Camus’s Caligula at the Mossovet Theater (1990), Guilty without Guilt by Ostrovsky at the Vakhtangov Theater (1993), Crommelynck’s The Magnificent Cuckold (1994), Tania-Tania by Mukhina with the Fomenko Theater Workshop (1996), The Queen of Spades by Pushkin (1996), and The Wedding by Chekhov (1996).
4. In the program of the 1998 Third International Chekhov Theater Festival, the Fomenko Theater Workshop is described in more detail as follows: «The current company of the Fomenko Workshop represents the second generation of its members. It unites nine actors and four directors, who have chosen to work together. The direction is supervised by the teachers of Petr Fomenko’s class, Sergei Zhenovach and Eugeny Kamenkovich, recently joined by Ivan Popovsky. The Workshop was originally conceived as an experimental theater, with a small company to be used by various directors to realize their respective projects and ideas, and with a view to revealing the actors’ potential, experimenting with complicated spatial arrangement of the stage and trying out different styles of production and acting. Another important goal was to continue with and to improve the young actors’ professional training. The Workshop has its ‘strategic reserve’ in the shape of Petr Fomenko’s graduate students at the State Institute of Cinematography.»
5. According to Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s vaudevilles «refine the technique of farce by their skilled timing and the sheer concentration of humour in every phrase, but they set the seal on an established vaudeville tradition and do not initiate any departure in the history of the Russian theater.» See Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 76.
6. In its program, the 1998 Third International Chekhov Theater Festival offers this description of the Moscow Art Theater: «The theater was established on the threshold of the twentieth century as an expression of protest against the routine which had reigned over both the imperial and provincial Russian stage. There were quite a number of great talented actors but the life of the theater was limited by its own work and this led to cliches of acting as well as to the unchanging response of the audience. . . . It is not an exaggeration that the 20th century in the Russian and world theater has been dominated by the activities of the [Moscow Art Theater].» The Moscow Art Theater was founded in 1898 by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
7. In recent years there have been productions in Moscow of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Camino Real, and Small Craft Warnings.
8. They include, among others, Olga Mukhina, Ksenia Dragunskaya, Elena Gremina, and Maria Arbatova.
9. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Shakespeare’s Kak vam eto poljubitsya (As You Like It) was staged at the Mayakovsky Theater; Dvenadtsataya noch’ (Twelfth Night) at the Stanislavsky Theater and the Fomenko Theater Workshop; Gamlet (Hamlet) at A. Raikin’s Satirikon Theater, Theatre na Pokrovke, and the Yugo-Zapad Theater; Romeo i Dzhul’etta (Romeo and Juliet) at Mark Rozovsky’s Nikita Gates Theater and the Yugo-Zapad Theater; Con v letnjuju noch’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) at the Yugo-Zapad Theater, the Moscow Chekhov Art Theater, and the Pushkin Theater; and Makbet (Macbeth) at the Yugo-Zapad Theater.
10. In 1998, the American Repertory Theater and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University began a «groundbreaking partnership» with the Moscow Art Theater School, where the Stanislavsky method was developed, to offer a two-year program in acting, directing, and theater management. The program begins with a summer semester in Cambridge, during which the incoming students become acquainted with the basic Stanislavsky techniques and the Russian language; the program also includes a semester of working in Moscow and performing on Stanislavsky’s home stage. For more details, see Rick Lyman’s «Studying the Method at Its Source,» The New York Times (11 November 1997), E3.
11. The Stanislavsky method (better known as Method acting) emphasizes psychological realism in actor training.
12. In the late 1980s, together with a local bank, Viktyuk established the Roman Viktyuk Theater.
14. John Freedman, «Big Names Keep Moscow Moving: The 1995-1996 Season,» Slavic and East European Performance 16, no. 3 (1996): 29.
15. «Kilimandzharo» is a reference to Ernest Hemingway’s short story «The Snows ofKilimanjaro.»