Time and destiny revisited

Sovremennik is now on what could be called a jubilee tour of Kyiv: once a Moscow cult theater, it celebrated its 50 th anniversary last spring.

In Soviet times, theaters could tour for up to a month to mark such an occasion. Today financial and artistic directors can only dream of this. After casting off the state’s ideological shackles, art is now forced, as a rule, to rely on its own means and commercial contacts. At the moment, Sovremennik is strong enough to bring two productions to Ukraine.

Compared to the previous tour, when the theater staged Dostoyevsky’s somber and heavy The Possessed against the backdrop of the Orange Revolution in Kyiv, this time the troupe headed by Galina Volchek brought some radiant and light-hearted productions. Sovremennik’s artistic director staged some of them: Volchek first produced George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion with Valentyn Haft as Prof. Higgins and Yelena Yakovleva as Eliza Doolittle 12 years ago. Since then, the hackneyed production has been reinvigorated with new blood (Ukrainian blood, incidentally).

The professor of linguistics, who makes a bet to turn a crude and uncouth street flower-seller into a refined, high-society lady who speaks the King’s English is now played by Sergei Makovetsky. He plays vigorously, displaying a characteristic tide of feelings and thoughts, which is quite justifiable in this case. Without this spiritedness it is impossible to transform the foolish flower seller, portrayed by Yakovleva, into a lady.

On the other hand, the actress will hardly win if she does not play a fool. Like any performer in the role of Eliza, in addition to confronting the difficult task of showing a striking contrast between an uneducated simpleton and a cultured salon lady, Yakovleva has to resort to characteristic camp in order to hide not only her innate good manners but also her age. For the comedy to continue as Sovremennik’s box-office success, the producer, who is now keeping things afloat with a firm hand, will probably have to consider infusing new female blood into her brainchild. Otherwise, the beautiful tale of a young Cinderella will soon turn into a drama about the last chance for a lady in her mid-to-late 30s.

The problem of age, which brings (or at least should bring) awareness of the tragic end of human dreams and aspirations, runs through the theater’s other production, Five Evenings by Aleksandr Volodin. It is not purely by chance that this legendary Soviet play reappeared in Sovremennik’s repertoire at the end of last season. If theatrical legends are anything to go by, this very play, which incurred the wrath of Communist Party bosses, brought fame in the late 1950s to Sovremennik, founded in 1956.

The production in Kyiv was staged by Galina Volchek and Oleg Yefremov, who also played the part of Ilyin. Back in 1959, one did not need to resort to all kinds of stage gimmickry to ensure success for Five Evenings. All you had to do was convincingly relate the story of two not-so-young people, who after 17 years of separation are trying to revive a relationship disrupted by the war. If actors managed to humanly perceive and play the external and inner situations of Volodin’s play, audiences were filled with unbridled emotions.

Now, besides conveying the theme of loneliness, frail feelings, and human destiny on stage, the theater must also take care to reproduce the atmosphere of those bygone nostalgic years. The drama’s plot abounds in dozens of important details that bind the play tightly to those times: the war and the Soviet system that breaks human lives, the showy and pretentious optimism of the heroine, which disguises her longing for simple feminine happiness, Soviet-style “bliss” in a shared apartment, where a three-liter jar stands in for a flower vase.

It would be a good idea if the producer now showed this jar as a highly illustrative metaphor of the main attribute of those times: everything in the country was upside down. The vicious system would misplace not only household items but also human beings, who were forced to betray their principles.

The new stage version of Five Evenings was written by Aleksandr Ogariov, a pupil of Anatolii Vasilev, who is still little known to Moscow theatergoers. Naturally, Volchek also made a contribution: actors say that it was she who finally licked the shaky production into shape in the last two weeks. The lack of a single directorial will inevitably had an impact on the result. The psychological element, so important in Five Evenings, has receded to the background. Serhii Harmash (as Ilyin) and especially Yelena Yakovleva (as Tamara) are more concerned about the outer, characteristic, aspect of their roles. Of course, the drama of these two individuals who are coming back to each other so painfully arouses sympathy, but one can hardly extrapolate it onto one’s own life.

By far the strongest sentiments are elicited by the musical hits of the 1950s and 1960s, and the stage settings designed by the St. Petersburg-based artist Natalia Dmitrieva, who managed to strike a nostalgic chord in the spectator’s heart. A snow-covered bench, a street lamp-post, and a window in the background that constantly glows with warmth and coziness, create the vision of a winter that presents us with New Year’s Eve, arguably the main holiday of our life. Nothing else but this holiday can arouse such agonizing nostalgia for life and make us ponder the most important thing.

The theater should be heading in a philosophical, rather than melodramatic, direction. This is also the opinion of the author who, together with Sergei Yesenin and Ilyin, who quotes this genius of Russian poetry, sadly asks, “My life, or am I only dreaming of you?”

The production was warmly received by Kyiv audiences even without any metaphysical innovations and profundities — at least by those who, oddly enough, have never seen Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1980 film Five Evenings. Audiences and journalists found it difficult to avoid comparing the stage production with this splendid movie because they consider the latter as the starting point in the history of this production. Having resisted the temptation of reminiscing about the brilliant constellation of actors that Mikhalkov managed to gather, I will simply repeat a well-known and appropriate truth: serving the Muses is incompatible not only with vanity but also with all kinds of commercial and marketing calculations.