Has not started yet. "The War Has Not Begun Yet": A Current Russian Play on the English Stage

The Praktika Theater staged a performance by Semyon Aleksandrovsky based on Mikhail Durnenkov's play “The War Has Not Begun Yet”. Tells Alla Shenderova.

This is the second Moscow premiere in the last two weeks, based on a text by Mikhail Durnenkov. The first was Utopia, staged at the Theater of Nations by Marat Gatsalov (see Kommersant on June 26). “The war has not begun yet” - a cycle of dialogues for three actors, the characters are named so: First, Second, Third. The gender and age of the actors, as the playwright writes, do not matter, and the sequence of scenes can be changed. And although in "Utopia" everything is more traditional (there is a single plot in which there is a mom-dad-son and a visiting businessman), it is easy to notice the commonality between the two texts.

In both, members of the same family act, exchanging mean, schematic remarks (“Are you crazy? - We almost went crazy! - We called the school! - I almost turned gray!”), But there is a secret in these crumpled dialogues. For example, in Chekhov, with his famous subtexts, words serve as screens: the heroes do not specifically talk about what hurts them. Durnenkov's heroes speak almost like robots, their speech is not colored with individuality, and at the same time, behind every word their (more precisely, ours) life with all the details is clearly visible.

Dialogues from "The War Has Not Begun Yet" are played not by three, but by nine young, but quite sophisticated artists - the same Brusnikinites (graduates of Dmitry Busnikin's workshop at the Moscow Art Theater School) who have settled in Praktik for a long time and whose "Chapaev and Emptiness "," This is also me "and" Cavalry "became hits.

Artist Lesha Lobanov staged a carnival on the tiny stage of Praktika: hung flags with the name of the performance in the back, inflated balloons, set up mannequins whose display poses spoil someone with a dead man's mask, someone with a suicide bomber's belt. Live actors huddled between the tall mannequins - in colored jeans and T-shirts and gore-out wigs. Two out of nine manage to be pianos in the intervals between replicas - in the depths under the flags there is a piano, others echo their play with rattles and squeaks: the chords written by the St. Petersburg composer Nastasya Khrushcheva resemble jingles from jukeboxes, as if they were played by desperate clowns. However, “anger” and “despair” are emotions that Semyon Aleksandrovsky does not allow into his performance. They remain outside the brackets - like all the details of the life of the First, Second and Third, which, unfortunately, we already know.

The play has a prologue taken by the director from the news. The most difficult thing for the actors is to read the news from the phone screen, taking off the wig and not hiding behind the image. Therefore, the prologue comes out a little too long: the audience does not have much fun, listening to how the police arrested an Australian who wrote his address on a bag of drugs - and suddenly he gets lost; or how the authorities of Nizhny Novgorod closed up a hole on the road, noting that it became a place for a photo session for foreigners.

The dialogues of Durnenkov, played out on behalf of silly clowns, are much stronger: someone shouts, tears passions to shreds, someone paints the text in inappropriate rainbow colors. And the play suddenly blossoms. There are three times more performers than heroes, so the dialogues are repeated, and then one of the characters suddenly admits that he (more precisely, she is Anastasia Velikorodnaya) is a robot with an absurd block, but the block fails, it is impossible to generate an absurdity; the robot is replaced by a family in which the son built a house for his parents, stopped by to visit and is now leaving. The mother thanks, pokes at the silent father: you should have said a word. The father, waiting for his son to leave, says that he will burn this house at five in the morning, when there is no wind. “And then he will come again. To me ”- the same Anastasia Velikorodnaya utters this phrase, filling the pauses between words with such a ringing joy of insight that the effect comes out stronger than from a whole performance about the relationship between fathers and children.

There are episodes among the episodes that I would like, as they say, to “unsee”: the dialogue of the TV journalist's wife, who believed in the fake news about the murdered child, because it was voiced from the screen by her husband. Arriving home and learning that his wife, in a panic, hid her own son with his mother, he tries to discourage her: this did not happen, that child is alive - "so that they did not do it, we said that it was." "Shhh! I'm watching news!" - the wife (Maria Krylova) enthusiastically interrupts - and the hall is covered with a wave of despair.

The war, which has not yet begun, but there is no end or edge to it, is hidden here not in precise words, but in pauses, in smiles, in the eagerness with which the Brusnikin people grab at their beepers and rattles, trying to siphon out and expel the horror that we cannot or are afraid to explain.

In a word, maybe this is not the most perfect performance by Semyon Aleksandrovsky, on account of which the charming hit "Fuel" and the aesthetic golden mask "Cantos" with Theodor Currentzis. But they squeak, crackle and pause in his performance very accurately.

About the daily "war" around us: in everyday life, TV, government agencies and even conversations with friends. "Snob" talked with the director of the play Semyon Aleksandrovsky, artistic director of "Praktika" Dmitry Brusnikin and actor Vasily Butkevich about their personal "war" and learned how they cope with the abundance of negative information

Ɔ. What are you fighting inside yourself and in the world around you?

Semyon Alexandrovsky:

Each person has people with whom he constantly has an internal dialogue. Most often these are his relatives, and this dialogue is very difficult, and there is a lot of war in it. It arises inevitably, because we often hurt each other, and then we experience it alone with ourselves. And I am trying to overcome this war within myself, because there is nothing more important than peace with loved ones. I am trying to make sure that this war does not come out.

I try not to fight with what is around me, on the contrary, I build relationships with the surrounding world on mutual agreement. If there is a ground for dialogue, I agree. If not, then I’m not fighting - I’m just leaving.

Dmitry Brusnikin:

I am not at war. Neither with the outside world, nor within oneself. I am talking. With myself - about laziness, impatience, some problems. And I'm in dialogue with outside world... There are a lot of annoying factors and aggressive manifestations, but there is no need to fight them.

Vasily Butkevich:

Every day I am at war with my complexes: with children or acquired later. I express all this on stage - 90 percent of my feelings go there.

In the world around me, I fight injustice. I do not like its manifestations either in relation to me or to other people. I can’t take it calmly: I often come into disagreement, I even get on the rampage - and because of this I suffer a lot.

Ɔ. How do you deal with the abundance of negative information around you?

Semyon Alexandrovsky:

My biggest shock comes with the material I'm working on. Once we were sketching the case of the 1968 demonstration on Red Square, and I had to read the protocols of the investigation - it was a very painful experience.

I try to limit the flow of information - sometimes I read the news, but I'm not very fond of it. If I feel aggression or anger inside, I try to disconnect. I made a conclusion for myself a long time ago: you cannot respond to negative with negative - you need to create an alternative.

Dmitry Brusnikin:

I try not to perceive the negativity and not let it into me. I read less news, watch little Facebook, limit myself this way. You need to compensate for this negative, read more. AND classic literature, and poetry. And listen to music.

Vasily Butkevich:

My profession saves me. If I heard something, I can come to a performance or rehearsal and throw out these emotions, somehow isolate myself from them.

If some tragedy has happened, then I try to avoid social networks, I don't watch TV at all. And I want to leave social networks altogether: every morning I open them and get a stream of dirt. I hope someday I will find the strength to do it.
Ɔ.

2014 will forever remain a tragic year in history. Such a long-awaited, welcome and joyful event for many residents of our country, like the “annexation” of Crimea, suddenly turned into a rapid collapse of the ruble, a fall in oil prices and sanctions that deprived the inhabitants of Russia of many products, medicines and the usual quality of life.

But all would not be a problem! For the sake of the peninsula, you can eat worse, and die early, and drive an old car. The trouble turned out to be in something else - in the outbreak of war with the once fraternal state, shot down planes, deaths on both sides and a propaganda machine that was unfolding in full force.

It was a terrible year. Which irreversibly changed the present and for a long time deprived of faith in the future.

In the same year, the playwright Mikhail Durnenkov writes a play “ The war hasn't started yet". The ominous title has already made this play an act of artistic actionism.

12 scattered, seemingly unrelated, parable studies. 3 impersonal characters. Throughout the play, there is an abstract debate-debate between "fathers and children", "men and women", "ours and yours" - no one concrete and absolutely recognizable by everyone - about the benefits / threat of street protests, about the officially undeclared war with Ukraine, about the impact on the psyche of state propaganda and the dominance of unreliable news, which today we have learned to call fake news in a fashionable way.

The play is incredibly strong and poignant. So much so that it seemed that in Russia she would never go on stage in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, a bright fate awaited her in the world. The play was read and staged in Scotland, England, Czech Republic, Romania, Lithuania.

After one of the last premieres in the city of Plymouth, British critics unanimously agreed that this play is the best way to get to know and understand modern Russia.

However, embittered, offended, militant, or simply sensitive patriots have no reason to worry. The English public was much less interested in the landscape of Russia. Someone noted that the sensations from the performance are as if they read Trump's twitter. Someone saw in the play an absolutely universal and universal human tendency of people to betray each other, ultimately betraying themselves. And he was not far from the truth.

Since the value of the play is not at all in its political position and direction. Most importantly, the playwright managed to capture the landscape around him in that very 2014 year, that point of no return, when everyone was hot and explosive enough that the slightest spark was enough to blow everything to shreds.

And now 4 years have passed. And what seemed incredible happens.

Theatre "Practice" Releases the first Russian premiere, where the director becomes Semyon Alexandrovsky, widely known to the theater audience for his performance "Fuel" and the opera "Cantos" that caused a stir.

No more Trump's twitter. Themselves with themselves decided to finally talk about the main and very painful.

The director chooses for this the most friendly and peaceful aesthetics - buffoonery, inviting everyone to laugh at the once terrible and to be frightened of the once funny, to change the point of no return to the point of contact.

The play opens not even with the play itself, but with the reading of the freshest and most relevant news stories. Here and pearls from RIA Novosti, and plots of infernal talk shows on federal channels, and consirological theories from the vastness of social networks. Everything finds its place. And everything serves that opportunity to laugh at oneself and the absurdity that is constantly happening around. Even the World Cup will receive attention.

An extremely interesting effect. Even in the morning you read the same “news” on the Internet or saw them on TV, and in the evening you sit and laugh at their absurdity with the whole audience.

But such a friendly atmosphere does not last long. All these "sketches of modernity" become only a means to return to that modernity of 2014, to modernize the events of the play.

The director approaches the play very carefully. The text, even if it undergoes a little processing, is presented to the viewer verbatim, with all its variety of subtexts. On behalf of the three characters, 9 guys from Dmitry Brusnikin's workshop, only increasing the versatility and impersonality of the characters.

The artists are dressed in stylish "clown" costumes. The entire space is filled with festive balloons and colorful garlands with the words “the war has not started yet”. Essentially an artist Lesha Lobanov created a kind of Russian version of the carnival of death, a feast during the plague, a festival of honey on the main street of the country, while the armed forces are fighting on the territory of another country.

But as it develops, some of the parable-etudes of the play begin to be repeated. The degree of anger in the presentation of the performers is growing. Due to the aesthetics of “clowning”, the director manages to achieve a valuable quality from the performers - the playful nature is isolated. The expression of faces, eyes, hand movements is becoming more beast, frenzied, more frenzied. Cute and funny clowns themselves do not notice how they transform into aggressive fanatics. And what caused laughter 10 minutes ago begins to scare me seriously. If someone laughs, then this laugh is no longer healthy. So the mother of the murdered child laughs.

The director in the program draws attention to the fact that he wanted to achieve a therapeutic effect, to experience traumatic events through a combination of laughter and horror. He succeeded. But only the performance now looks more like a diagnosis.

Today he says that it only seems that "the war has not yet begun." The war does not start on the same day and hour at all. It is preceded by a mass of events, choices, disputes, views and delusions. And this is war. War with an incipient war. Where everyone is on their own personal battlefield. And you can only win if you lose the war. Get her out of your head.

An extremely important performance. Terribly funny. And seriously scary. Go, please!

“Tomorrow I will come and we will do it. And we will be free. And we will be together. And it will never hurt again. " (c) "The war has not begun yet", M. Durnenkov

While Yuri Polyakov unsuccessfully complains about status back streets about the absence of modern (that is, Polyakov's) drama in the repertoires of any significant theaters, Mikhail Durnenkov has his second premiere in a week, and after the technically and visually sophisticated "Utopia" by Marat Gatsalov at the Theater of Nations -

It even more resembles the kindergarten matinee of yesterday's students "The war has not yet begun", but such a conceptual solution is deliberately proposed by the director Semyon Aleksandrovsky, together with the costume designer Lesha Lobanov, who dressed up the "Brusnikinites" already real movie stars, on which the audience is aiming - Vasily "Rag Union" and " Good boy"Butkevich, overgrown with a beard, but recognizable Peter" Pupil "Skvortsov) in acid-bright hipster clothes and synthetic wigs in very poisonous colors.

"I love things that make you sticky" - says the nameless character of the play, but they are all nameless here, and the play consists of a set of monologues or duet sketches, which are also repeated and interspersed with "musical" beats when young the actors among the balls and flags are knocking with squeaky hammers, blowing whistles and strumming something uncomplicated and not too euphonious on a half-broken ("prepared") piano.

In Karen Shakhnazarov's film "Courier", young heroes strummed and shouted a song about a goat in the same way, expressing through it - and not having, not finding any other legal means - the extreme degree of irritation that the surrounding musty reality got them. In the same 1986, when "Courier" came out, Clara Novikova appeared on the stage with the number "We Shall Not Go to the Beach Today", her heroine, an actress, covered with a miserable soviet life, was supposed to play a satire on the decaying west, but instead of exposing the bourgeoisie fell into hysterics and, before pulling herself together, managed to "expose" the same reality that bothered Shakhnazar's youngsters. Gone, as they say, years, I would even say, decades - but the reality is musty and got everyone who has not yet completely rotted the contents of the cranium, first of all, of course, again youngsters. "The War Has Not Begun Yet", being a pamphlet on the topic of the day, immediately reminded me of both an episode from a film and a pop-humorous number of more than thirty years ago.

Among the scenes-refrains in "War ..." - a dialogue between mom and dad, who saw their son in reports from the "peace rally" and, in addition to the animal parental excitement for the offspring, sincerely wondering what the "child" is doing there, under "enemy" flags - well, yes, it's topical. Or a phantasmagoric "robot with a block of absurdity" ... At the same time, an attempt to delve into the relationship of a couple after a club acquaintance and casual sex seems to be neither to specific historical (and geographical, the situation is universal - he "found his only", and she remembered about "her husband and children" in the morning) she is not attached to realities, nor does she go deep into the characters of the characters, also nameless, but also passes as a leitmotif. I would not exaggerate either the literary merits of the material (collect a dozen fragmentary entries from the Facebook of Evgeny Kazachkov or Valery Pecheikin - and perhaps the play is even better!), Or the originality of the stage embodiment of the text, but through refrains to show how it grows through each " carrying out the theme "on an empty, in general, place, the degree of aggression, the actors of Brusnikin's Workshop (in some scenes the boys play for the girls, and the actresses take over the text of the characters of men, to heighten the" defamiliarisation ", not otherwise) succeed.

The material, as in the case of Utopia, is too straightforward and even sketchy for a pamphlet. Especially with regard to the scene (but, however, it is not repeated, once is enough for clarity) with the participation of the husband and wife, when the husband, apparently the TV news host, comes home and does not find the child there, the wife sent her son to her grandmother out of fright when he saw in her husband's program a report about a publicly burnt child (well, hello to the "crucified boy" is read without prompts); and although the husband explains that this is a fake, that there was no boy, the wife prefers to believe what she saw on TV, and not the words of her husband told her in an intimate setting: they say, if you want me to calm down, go and tell me on TV that the burned boy is a fiction; well, he, of course, will not go and say, he is not paid for that ... Well, the monologue multiplied by four voices about the attempt to quit smoking is probably intended to set off political journalism - but it sounds neither to the village nor to the city.

The performance of Praktika tries to convey not immediately, not suddenly, and without clarifying (there is nothing to clarify), but drowning out, including literally, chants the pathos of the play. Whatever target audience this statement (and statements here are clearly more than an image) is intended, I obviously do not get into it - I do not "stick" - despite the fact that I am ready to share the pathos in advance, I just do not need to watch the performance for this. An uncomplicated, albeit catchy form - also flies slightly past me, despite the fact that looking at the costumes, at the young actors in them, at how in the end they change clothes with the costumed mannequins that stood idle for an hour on the site, there are still a few more fun than listening to the words they say. Due to the energy of the performers, all this "propaganda team" to "beat the enemy" somehow keeps up - but by God, not hesitating to resort to cliches, you involuntarily think: your energy - yes for peaceful purposes.