New production of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater “The Bright Path. 19.17 ", where Sergei Tchoban and Agniya Sterligova acted as stage designers, is an attempt to comprehend the events of the October Revolution through the eyes of a very young generation and expressive means of the newest time. It is not for nothing that a dot in the date in the title of the performance indicates: it should be read as it is nowadays in accordance with the English-speaking tradition - "nineteen seventeen". The continuation of the Soviet tradition of "Danish" performances in our time is almost a challenge, and from the stage of the Moscow Art Theater this challenge is thrown by the 25-year-old director and actor Alexander Molochnikov, who, despite the - again defiant - youth, already two independent productions plus a full-length feature film "Myths" with the participation of a whole group of Russian stars. By the way, the collaboration between Molochnikov and Tchoban began with the film: it seemed to Alexander that no one could better come up with a visual series for his very Moscow painting than an architect.
They were introduced by the famous artist Pavel Kaplevich, and the venerable architect and the young actor somehow immediately found a common language - moreover, they realized that they had something to say to each other not only in a human, but also in a creative way, that it was easy and interesting for them what to invent something together. Even if you do not know that the set design of the performance was done by a professional architect, it is obvious that he was a person with well-developed spatial thinking. A draftsman, exhibition designer, collector, publisher - in all his guises, Choban remains faithful to his main profession: if it is a drawing, then an architectural one, if a magazine, then about architecture, if a museum, then again an architectural drawing. This applies to the scenography of the "Light Path" in full. A powerful, large-scale and at the same time laconic decoration does not serve and does not illustrate the action - it shapes it to a certain extent, leads it, dictating its own laws, giving what is happening on the stage new facets and meanings and even somehow disciplining it, which is not superfluous in this extremely crowded phantasmagoria performance with its cycle of mise-en-scenes and constantly changing ratio of foreground and background.
Molochnikov himself invented a plot about how a simple working guy Makar (Artem Bystrov) falls into the hands of the "holy trinity" of demiurges and political strategists Lenin, Krupskaya and Trotsky (Igor Vernik, Inga Oboldina / Irina Pegova, Artem Sokolov), gets a fiery motor instead of a heart - and later steel arms-wings - and set off to make a revolution: take the Winter Palace, agitate the soldiers, fight with fists. The quivering ballerina in love with him with the speaking name Vera (Victoria Isakova), picked up after the beloved whirlwind of revolutionary romanticism, continues his work in the rear, organizing a new way of life in the compacted house of the former bass of large and small imperial theaters (Alexei Vertkov).
The main design element is a multi-layered portal that fits perfectly into the semicircle of the Mkhatov stage, assembled from textured, as if rumpled metal arches. It evokes a lot of associations: some - like the vault of a church or the arch of the General Staff - are directly proposed by the creators of the play, some are left to the imagination of the viewer. Sometimes this portal is perceived as an endless tunnel, dragging into an eerie swirling darkness, sometimes, on the contrary, resembles a megaphone from the depths of which Comrade Lenin, who is also "Father Vladimir", enlightens his spiritual children. And since for the heroes of the play he is both a prophet, and a king, and a god, the semicircle above his head is read at the same time as a kind of halo.
Another quite architectural technique: the side portals of the wings are lined horizontally into cells-cells, which at the right time are filled with figures of actors, embodying in their staticity an additional element of architectural plastics. What else?.. Yes, actually, that's all. There is practically no need not only for some decorations, but also for props: of the furniture on the stage, apart from a lonely piano, there is only a certain number of stools, which are as gray as the entire surrounding space. This quite functional object often takes on a symbolic, even conceptual role: it is enough to recall the endless queue with stools in hand, vividly embodying the dull reality of a communal apartment. Alexander Molochnikov recalls how long the creators of the play went to this laconic image, how many options were swept aside with laundry hung to dry, kettles and pots, and other communal rubbish … But in the end it turned out that all this can be done without, and the designer of stools does not function worse than any "Lego" and from it you can build any item you need - from a bed to a podium.
Of course, theatrical machinery is also involved, since the large stage of the Moscow Art Theater provides considerable opportunities for this. The platforms that rise in the course of the action either raise the heroes above the canvas of the scene, then hide them under themselves, depicting, for example, the cramped closet of Makar and Vera.
If typologically a series of successive sketches that make up a performance is akin to a comic book, stylistically this comic comes from the mass propaganda art of the 1920s with its idealization of the “new man” and merciless caricatures of “enemies”. The schematic nature of the political poster can be traced both in the images of the characters, and in the mise-en-scenes, and even in the program for the play, on the cover of which the actors in the form of athletes froze in a gymnastic pyramid - "Do it again!" The program, by the way, is also very architectural - it is illustrated with drawings by Sergei Tchoban, which are not sketches for the play, but are in an undeniable relationship with him: each of them is an attempt to comprehend the same events in Russian history.
One of the advantages of the "magic of the theater" is the almost unlimited possibilities that purely theatrical technologies carry within themselves, capable of magically transforming the "matting into an ermine". The structure of the portal sometimes looks like it was made of rough stone, sometimes it casts a dull sheen of tin or gold leaf, or even the pimpled skin of some sinister reptile. As if in mockery, the main color of the "Light Path" is hopelessly gray with rare splashes of black and scarlet, but thanks to the art of the lighting designer (Alexander Sivaev), the scene is illuminated with blue reflections of hope, or with blood-red flashes of mass executions.
In full accordance with modern concepts of multimedia theater, the performance contains elements of related arts, from choreography to video mapping. The textbook shots of the capture of Zimny from Eisenstein's "October" are projected onto the backdrop, midgets from Alexander Ptushko's "New Gulliver" march between Gulliver's legs (again, by the way, an arch!) Chevenguru "… According to the director, video inserts are also largely the idea of architects and set designers, and their embodiment is the handiwork of Agnia Sterligova," a fragile girl who did all this and was looking for. Made, remodel and handled the camera harshly like a real professional. " By the way, if for Choban this is a theatrical debut, then Agnia has already acted as a set designer: back in 2015, together with Sergei Kuznetsov, she designed the opening ceremony of the historical stage of the Helikon-Opera after restoration.
“Most of all,” says Sergei Tchoban, “we wanted to convey the aching feeling of the transformation of a large solemn space into a communal apartment, cut into tiny cells, when the perfect turns into a distorted, large - into a small, majestic - into, so to speak, reduced to a farce” … This, in fact, is the main idea of the scenery, and if you look from this point of view, our long-suffering story takes on another angle, quite tragic, no matter how cheery burlesque it may be disguised.
