This year the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater turns 100 years old. It was decided to mark the round date with a memorable gesture - and was placed inside the main building, which was built by Ludwig Fontana in 1877, another theater - Plywood.
The project has three creators: the theater's artistic director Andrei Moguchy, artist Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai and architect Andrei Vorontsov from the ARKHATAKA association. It turned out to be something like an installation, and very bold, given the reverence of Petersburgers to everything historical. The new theater is quite real and functional, but the main thing in it is the concept and the message. And it is absolutely impossible to talk about him without some exaltation.
The plywood theater intrudes into the space of the old building boldly: the structure is voluminous, carmine-colored, the sharp "nose" climbed into the parterre, and the "body" freely spread along the stairs, corridors and halls. It is impossible not to notice, not to meet, not to marvel at the impudence, curiosity, greed with which a new substance captures the inviolable.
And yet for the audience who came to the old, "beautiful" theater, this is not only a challenge and provocation. For all its energy, the "lodger" is surprisingly effective, but at the same time and subtly sets off the classic interiors, already familiar and therefore long unnoticed. It makes you love them even warmer, or you think: maybe something new is really missing here?
Those who bought a ticket to the Plywood Theater find themselves in a completely new space, and see the old interiors only indirectly. "Portal" begins near the main entrance, there is a wardrobe here. Then the viewer walks along the corridors, through the lower and upper foyers, on the way meeting parts and signs of the old theater - "opening" to the monuments to Gorky and Tovstonogov, an impressive chandelier, "eyes" through which one can "peep" behind the classic interiors. The auditorium is designed for 23 people, the stage is unusual - it is small, triangular, and the full height of a person is visible on it only if he is standing at the far point of the "wedge".
Wedge refers to the works of El Lissitzky, and the entire Plywood Theater is a dedication to the artists who once worked at the BDT, and there are many of them: Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Alexander Benois, Boris Kustodiev, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and many others. Outside the Plywood Theater, there are memorial marble plaques with their names.
For each performance of the Main Stage, the "wedge" is dismantled - it takes about one night, and the auditorium turns into a box. The Plywood Theater is expected to run until the end of the year.