Ðåæèññåðû | ÍÎÂÀß ÐÓÑÑÊÀß ÐÅÂÎËÞÖÈß [Îòêðûòèå ÒÅÀÒÐ. DOC è ðóññêèé ïðîåêò «Ðîéÿë Êîðò» â ìàðòå 2002, Ïîë Òýéëîð], 6.03.2002 Russian theatre is finally addressing modern concerns — thanks, in part, to the Royal Court. Paul Taylor went to see how a London theatre helped Moscow's dramatists to find a voice 06 March 2002 In one of the oldest parts of Moscow, to the east of Red Square, there's a stocky white building called the English Court. It was restored in honour of the Queen's state visit to Russia in 1994 and it boasts (if that's the right word) a framed photograph of Her Majesty signing the visitors' book. Ivan the Terrible, who had unavailing marital designs on Elizabeth I, donated the house as a kind of embassy for the English traders who began commerce with Russia in 1553. A fortnight ago, I visited this place in the company of a young Moscow dramatist, Alexander Rodionov, and confronted by one of the rooms, we both burst out laughing. In opposite corners, there's an exhibition of relics and facsimiles of the wares that the two countries initially exchanged. Sixteenth-century England does not come out of this comparison smelling of roses. In the Russian corner, the items are all pacific and nurturing (honey, furs, rope, caviar and mica) while the English corner is a sheer blast of belligerence, bristling with muskets, pikes and gunpowder. My Moscow trip comes as a direct result of a recent, more constructive British intervention in Russian cultural life. We in England are just about to reap the rewards, in the shape of a showcase at the Royal Court of the highly impressive work that has emerged from the interchange. The season is to include a full promenade production(with an English director and cast) of Plasticine, a clear-eyed and bitterly comic look at provincial life in Russia today from the hot young playwright Vassily Sigarev, and verbatim-project pieces from two fresh Siberian companies, which will plunge us into the experiences of workers in a mining commune, into the revealing correspondence between Russian conscripts sent to Chechnya and their mothers and lovers back home, and into the lives of a poverty-stricken fishing community adrift on an ice floe. As I learn quickly, Moscow is on the move in many senses. Even the street names are refusing to stay put. My first meeting is scheduled to take place at a trendy new night-spot called Klon (aka Clone). But the British Council's Russian driver drops me off outside a different establishment altogether, where there's a panic-inducing paucity of people who can understand a word I utter. I've been in a mad rush because of a flight delay, so I am without roubles or a map (or any Russian), and the one girl who speaks a tiny amount of English denies that this is even the street I'm expecting (Pushkinskaya) and directs me to a parallel road. I find out later that she both is and isn't right. The names of the streets in the area are in the process of changing and migrating. It's only because Oskolkova, the drama and dance manager at the British Council in Moscow, has asked for a description of me that I'm not still lost. She hails me from another door and introduces me to Elena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov, who run the pioneering new-writing project. The following night, this pair are going to launch a venue that would have been inconceivable a couple of years ago: a centre for contemporary playwriting, right in the centre of the city, called Theatr.doc. Klon is achingly hip and minimalist. Tatyana notices me frowning in puzzlement at the www.youneverknow.ru logo etched out in large, stone letters over the dining area. Having spent her life in international relations, Tatyana has a broad, humane culture and learned wit. She teases me that the logo is an allusion to the French fashion designer Chanel, who even slept in full make-up on the grounds that “you never know” when you will meet your man and so should always look your best. I relax and think to myself: I'm going to enjoy this trip. It's enjoyable and inspiring to meet a gifted generation of new twentysomething playwrights, whose sense of their own creativity was legitimised by an intervention from a happy hook-up between the British Council and the Royal Court's international department. In 1999, Plasticine's fine translator, Sasha Dugdale, then the council's cultural chief in Moscow, invited the Royal Court to take part in a seminar about new writing, which included translated excerpts from the work of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber. The turmoil of post-Communist experience has not been reflected on the stages of Moscow's 200-plus theatres. During my own recent visit, there were 16 productions of Chekhov's The Seagull to choose from and only 10 new plays. So, at that packed seminar, the effect was electrifying when the Court's literary manager, Graham Whybrow, delivered a speech about the principles and vision of a theatre that puts the living writer at the centre of his practice. Everyone you speak to in Moscow theatre says that talk caused a revolution. The stranglehold of officialdom had been such that Russian dramatists who held similar views had kept them bottled up. The cork was now drawn, and the response, said one of my interviewees, bordered on “the irrational”. Russian dramatists began to talk to one another, and then, as a result of follow-up work by the Court, they began to talk to the people on the streets. Elyse Dodgson, the head of the international department, went out to hold workshops on verbatim theatre — on how to gather and shape personal testimony to create drama of intense immediacy. Stephen Daldry flew over and spearheaded a piece that drew on conversations with the homeless who doss down in Moscow's railway stations. It resulted in a wave of monologues, collectively entitled Moscow: Open City, which became the rage of the metropolitan nightclubs, a cross between stand-up, drama and personal witness. And now I'm on my way to Gorky Leninskiye, Lenin's country retreat. Inside, a gigantic white effigy of him still looks down from the top of a sweeping red-carpeted staircase. This place used to be a mecca for tourists, but it is now in the throes of a creative-identity crisis. Before Lenin, it was the home of a hero of Borodino and of the merchant Morozov, who, strangely, gave money to both Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre and the Bolsheviks. Post-Communism, who would have thought it would ever become the workshop for a new-writing project? It's comparable to rehearsing Brecht in Hitler's bunker. Yet for 10 excited, sleepless days last autumn, that is precisely what it was turned into, again through the input of the British Council. My guides are the young playwright Sergei Kaluzhanov, the theatre director Alexander Vartanov and the museum's deputy director, Alexandra Kalyakina. They tell me of how they did a piece on the museum's attendants, people who have worked there for more than 30 years, and on the myths about the place that they have stoutly cherished. They relate how Maxim Kurochkin, regarded by many as the most talented of the new wave of dramatists, had so internalised the testimony of the vagrants he had worked with that he performed without a script, taking questions from the audience and answering in character. It's not just writers who benefit from verbatim. The process releases actors, too, from the prison of a literary tradition that has left them unused to evoking the contemporary on stage. A whirlwind tour one day with Vassily Chernov, a young theatre producer, makes me feel that every place where we alight has potential for drama: whether it's the new Bagration Bridge — a river-spanning megalopolis of shops and banks; or the Park of Sculptures, a fascinating knacker's yard of discredited iconic monuments; or the poverty-stricken apartment in the centre of the city where an old lady occupies half a former baronial ballroom, but has no toilet or bathing facilities. The opening festivities at Theatr.doc are high-spirited and low-maintenance. The venue, with its studio-sized performance space, is still a bit of a building site and, to symbolise the abrasive intent of the project, the writers, directors, and friends and supporters are each given a square of black emery paper to nail to the walls. There are tributes to and from the Royal Court, and future verbatim schemes are outlined — one involves asking Russia's elderly folk, who have gone through violent vicissitudes in the past century, what ambitions they have for the rest of their lives. I have read the work they have done in translation, and the quality is extraordinarily high. I tease some of the playwrights that the time will come when there's no community left to explore. I also suggest, fancifully at first, that they should do a verbatim piece about the dramatists of the immediately preceding generation, whom history dealt a dud hand. Too late to be of the Alexander Gelman anti-Soviet-corruption school, and too early to take full flight with this new generation, to which some of them react, apparently, with understandable jealousy. Then it occurs to me that this might not be a bad idea: the young making a real imaginative effort to understand their immediate forebears, as Russian new-writing theatre moves forward into what looks set to be an exciting future. International Playwrights Season, Royal Court, London SW1 (020—7565 5100).'Steps to Siberia' to Sat.'Plasticine' opens 15 Mar http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/story.jsp?story=271278 | |
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