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Vladimir Etush brilliantly played in Arthur Miller's "The Price" an old Jew who never tires of enjoying life |
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Roman Dolzhansky. . The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary ( Kommersant, 11/16/2011). Alena Karas. . The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary ( RG, 11/15/2011). Grigory Zaslavsky. . The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary without a president or prime minister ( NG, 11/15/2011). Olga Egoshina. . (The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary with the premiere). New news, 11/15/2011 Elena Dyakova. .). The Vakhtangov Theater is 90 years old ( Novaya Gazeta, 11/13/2011 Dina Goder.). . Rimas Tuminas staged a performance for the stars for the anniversary of the Vakhtangov Theater ( MN, 11/15/2011). Marina Raikina.. A foreigner taught a lesson to Russian theatergoers (). |
MK, 11/15/2011
Alexey Bartoshevich.
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OpenSpace.ru, 11/18/2011
Pier. Theater named after Vakhtangov. Press about the performance
Kommersant, November 16, 2011 "Pier" of memory The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary The Moscow Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary with the premiere of the play “The Marina”, created under the direction of Rimas Tuminas, in which illustrious veterans of the Vakhtangov troupe took to the stage. At the premiere dedicated to the anniversary, ROMAN DOLZHANSKY was touched and sad. Only the finale reminds us of the traditions of anniversary celebrations in the play “The Pier,” when the stage is covered by a white screen-sail, and photographs are projected onto it.
famous actors invented not only nobly, but also very cunningly: in fact, it is a performance-concert consisting of excerpts. There are nine of them in total; eight were played on the anniversary day, but it is easy to imagine a performance of “The Pier” consisting of seven or six parts (especially since the eight-part composition lasted four hours). The program is made in the form of a set of postcards that can be easily shuffled. It’s just as easy to shuffle the fragments of the performance - no important through-thought can be read in this composition, where Pushkin sits side by side with Eduardo De Filippo, and Brecht with Bunin. The water theme specified in the title makes itself felt only through the occasional sounds of waves. The pier is, of course, the Vakhtangov Theater itself, the architecture of which is reminiscent of Adomas Jacovskis’s set, which remains almost unchanged throughout the evening: high walls, columns, wooden benches, a theatrical chandelier and the darkness of the stage depths.
A group benefit evening is not the case when it is appropriate to discuss the work of the director, especially since an entire director’s team worked on the performance and the authorship of this or that fragment remained anonymous. Moreover, when we're talking about about middle-aged masters of the stage, one can hardly expect amazing metamorphoses - and it is not surprising that, say, Vasily Lanovoy reads Pushkin as loudly and joyfully as two or three eras ago. It is clear that the main thing in this performance is the very fact of the audience meeting their favorite actors. And no matter how the set of “Pharty” changes, four fragments from those shown on the day of the 90th anniversary seem especially valuable.
Two of them still ask to be developed into entire performances - “The Price” by Arthur Miller and “The Lady’s Visit” by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. When Yulia Borisova first appears in the role of millionaire Clara Tsakhanassyan, who came to her hometown in order to get the life of her longtime lover in exchange for big money, the audience literally froze with admiration. Princess Turandot appears as an active and powerful queen - eccentric and mysterious, chiseled and at the same time majestic. One can only be annoyed that Borisova’s previous premiere in her native theater was back in the last century. This is probably why in her first episode the actress seems a little constrained, but when a dramatic turning point occurs in the role, Borisova’s temperament and subtlety, when combined, work so strongly that you are ashamed of yourself, who a minute ago involuntarily calculated the actress’s age.
Vladimir Etush and his hero - furniture seller Gregory Solomon from "Price" - are the same age. “I’m almost 90,” Etush addresses this remark directly to the audience, which literally explodes with applause. Many other remarks from Solomon are thrown into the hall - an ironic and wise old Jew, a philosophizing businessman, seemingly tired of life, but never ceasing to enjoy every second of it. And if Yulia Borisova’s play recalls the aristocracy and sublime nobility of the Vakhtangov tradition, then Vladimir Etush’s play is about its slyness, masks and buffoonery.
Finally, not excerpts from plays, but two short stories by Bunin. One is a little-known, “Benevolent Participation,” played by 95-year-old Galina Konovalova, an actress who was never one of the Vakhtangov celebrities. Only her tenth decade brought her universal veneration and notable new roles. Of course, the audience looks at her as a curiosity: a woman who is older than her academic theater, literally flutters around the stage in high-heeled shoes, shows off her graceful legs and invites you to appreciate her cleavage, juggles the text as if she were improvising, changes outfits literally in front of the audience and does not forget to flirt with them. In the story about a forgotten old actress anxiously preparing to perform at a charity evening, Galina Konovalova mixes in a fair amount of self-irony - and thereby relieves the audience of the inconvenience that delicate viewers would have to experience at “Favorable Participation.”
When Yuri Yakovlev appears on stage, leaning on a cane, the audience seems to turn into a single whole, shrinking with love for this wonderful actor and in concern for him. It seems that of all the physical means of expression he now has only one voice.
“Dark Alleys” by Bunin Yakovlev plays with his own voice, in the velvet folds of which one can find bitterness from the irrevocability of the past, and strict acceptance of fate, and surprise at the inability to understand a higher providence, and some kind of enviable courtesy of parting with earthly things. When the story is finished, the hero slowly moves into the depths of the stage, and against the background of the opening light backdrop, his black figure, as if preparing to take off, suddenly begins to lightly dance - and in parting, without turning around, he waves his cane. “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten,” Bunin said. This dance-departure of Yuri Yakovlev will never be forgotten.
RG, November 15, 2011
Alena Karas
The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary
The number "13" became for the Theater. Evgeniy Vakhtangov is truly happy. In 1913, students of the young actor, who had already become famous as the best teacher in Stanislavsky’s “system,” formed the Vakhtangov Studio. On September 13, 1920, they joined the large Moscow Art Theater family under the name of the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theater. November 13, 1921 - the day of the premiere of Maeterlinck's "The Miracle of St. Anthony" - became the birthday of the new theater.
The death of the teacher (Vakhtangov died in 1922) did not stop the flourishing of the new theater movement.
The tragic was combined with the festive, and “Princess Turandot,” which was staged by a dying artist in hungry Moscow, became a symbol of those paradoxes that were entrenched in the cultural consciousness under the loose but perceptible concept of “Vakhtangov.”
The current artistic director of the theater, Rimas Tuminas, together with directors Anatoly Dzivaev, Vladimir Eremin, Vladimir Ivanov and Alexey Kuznetsov tried to touch the energy of these paradoxical combinations.
The “school students” carry her away in their arms. And in the same way - in their arms - they will then carry the great Yulia Borisova (grandiously - on the verge of grotesque and high melodrama - who played Dürrenmatt's "A Lady's Visit"), Vasily Lanovoy, who reads Pushkin, Lyudmila Maksakova, who played another Countess in her life - for this once from "The Player" by Dostoevsky.
A flurry of applause greeted them all, but it seems that only once the audience (and this is literally the entire theatrical and cinematic Moscow from Valentin Gaft to Nikita Mikhalkov) could not stand it and burst into applause right at the actor’s exit. Yuri Yakovlev elegantly and quietly emerged from Ivan Bunin's story "Dark Alleys", and his first words sounded so inexpressibly simple and perfect that my heart sank. The beauty of a sudden meeting with the woman he loved, the feeling of irrevocability, the cold clarity of old age, the fragility of happiness - everything was played with such quiet, piercing simplicity that no buskin, no signs of theatrical glory would have passed here.
But the festival of theatricality - poignant and daring - continued. Vladimir Etush played appraiser Solomon in Arthur Miller's play The Price. The precise melody of Jewish speech, calculated as a musical passage, the phenomenal humor of Ecclesiastes, connecting the love of life and the painful feeling of leaving - all this was played by Etush in a few minutes of stage life.
The excited “Miserere” sounds, a prayer for all the living and the dead, and on a huge silk panel, beating like a sail in the wind, faces emerge: the faces of knights and martyrs of the theater. Mansurova, Orochko, Gritsenko, Simonov, Ulyanov. And the first is Vakhtangov. Crying for a theater that will never be there again, the rustle of time, carrying away faces and voices, the celebration of the theater that resides in the actors, joy and hopes for new roles converged on the “Pharty” to gather strength for a new voyage.
NG, November 15, 2011
Grigory Zaslavsky
At the pier in captivity
The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary without a president or prime minister
On Sunday, the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Academic Theater celebrated the theater’s 90th anniversary without official speeches or solemn congratulatory addresses. There was neither the president nor the prime minister in the hall. Vladimir Putin, who was expected at the theater, chose the 50th anniversary of KVN out of two “humanitarian” anniversaries that fell on the weekend.
The Vakhtangov Theater is not the first to celebrate the anniversary not with an anniversary concert, but with a revue performance, but there is no doubt that “The Marina”, prepared by the Vakhtangov theater for its 90th anniversary, will become one of the hits of the current theater season. And in the same way, most likely, many theater awards and festivals will bypass “Pristan” with their attention: the performance is too uneven, in which obvious masterpieces of Vakhtangov’s style are side by side with numbers that are quite ordinary.
Apparently, the artistic director of the Vakhtangov Theater Rimas Tuminas initially planned to bring old people to the anniversary "Pier". The Vakhtangov Theater is probably the last in the entire space of the former USSR, where four people can appear on stage in one performance. folk artist Soviet Union. Like in “Pristan”, where four “rooms”, one after another, are led by Yulia Borisova, Vasily Lanovoy, Yuri Yakovlev and Vladimir Etush. But then the “old-timers” were supplemented by mature ones, but by age they did not have time to become people of the USSR - Irina Kupchenko, Evgeny Knyazev, Sergey Makovetsky... Everyone chose what they liked, that is, the role of their dreams. Sergei Makovetsky did not have time to rehearse “Richard III” for the anniversary, but there remains hope that this fragment will eventually end up in the performance, where the replacement of numbers, hopefully, will not be explained by natural physical decline. As long as possible, I hope!
On Sunday evening, “all of Moscow” gathered in the hall of the Vakhtangov Theater - in its theatrical guise.
The “waves,” which echoed what was happening and “beat” one number from another, seemed to wash away one picture and make way for the next beneficiary. Vyacheslav Shalevich chose a scene from Brecht's Galileo, Irina Kupchenko and Evgeny Knyazev performed duets from Filumena Marturano, a play that was once performed with great success on the Vakhtangov stage. Vasily Lanovoy went out and read the poems of Pushkin, his favorite poet, to whom he remained faithful even in the face of the temptation to play a hitherto unplayed role... Yulia Borisova chose Dürrenmatt’s “A Lady’s Visit,” and Vladimir Etush - the role of old Solomon, a buyer of junk from Arthur Miller’s “The Price” . On Sunday, it was Etush who had the greatest success, although, as the great Swedish actor Erland Josefson, who played for Bergman and Tarkovsky, once noted, you don’t have to be an old Jew to play an old Jew.
The audience did not allow Yuri Yakovlev to begin for a long time and saw off with an ovation, who read Bunin’s story “Dark Alleys” with Lydia Velezheva. The final fragment from Dostoevsky’s “The Gambler,” where Lyudmila Maksakova performed as a soloist, also went off with a bang. But most of the applause still fell to the Honored Artist of Russia Galina Konovalova, who celebrated a major anniversary in the summer (she has been playing in Vakhtangovsky’s troupe since 1938!). She also chose Bunin, his story about the annual performance of a middle-aged actress, and played him surrounded by silent actors with some incredible naturalness, simplicity, which became somehow the highest manifestation of the acting craft and Vakhtangov's lightness and grace.
New news, November 15, 2011
Olga Egoshina
Parade of planets
The Vakhtangov Theater celebrated its 90th anniversary with the premiere
The leitmotif of the production was the solemn thrice-repeated Miserere by composer Faustas Latenas, which sounded like the final coda to the great performance “Macbeth” by Eimuntas Nekrosius. The eschatological notes of farewell to the past with a somewhat macabre shade - an indispensable feature of any anniversary (an anniversary is always a farewell to some part of one's life) - were sounded here with purely Vakhtangovian fearlessness.
The set of names for anniversary scenes could be stunning in its diversity. There are prose stories and excerpts from plays, and poetry readings. Dostoevsky and Eduardo de Filippo, Bunin and Brecht, Miller and Pushkin, Shakespeare and Durenmatt. Rimas Tuminas did not even try to build and knit this patchwork fabric, to unite it with a common thought and mood. “The Marina” is built according to the laws not of a play, but of a concert, where you can change the order of numbers, you can abandon this or that fragment. A concert where the numbers are by no means equal, and pearls quite calmly coexist with pebbles. The program of the performance itself is designed as a set of postcards that can be easily shuffled in any arbitrary order. And this also emphasizes the tone of the anniversary performance, conceived not at all as a director’s statement, but as a parade of the elders of the Vakhtangov stage, where each number is a gift and a declaration of love.
Tuminas carefully constructs the appearance and departure of the first subjects, when the applause of the stage participants and the audience merges. The dazzling Yulia Borisova emerges from the depths of the stage on a palanquin. A golden outfit, a long feather on her hat, a familiar voice with a slight hoarseness and drawl on the vowels: “I always stop the train”... Multimillionaire Clara Tsakhanassyan, the “old lady” appears as the victorious princess Turandot... A light, fit Vasily Lanovoi emerges from the blizzard with his marvelous voice , flying to the third tier, almost sings Pushkin’s: “When, intoxicated with love and bliss, / Silently kneeling before you, / I looked at you and thought: you are mine, / - You know, dear, whether I wanted glory”...
And you again catch yourself thinking that somewhere behind the scenes of the Vakhtangov Theater, the elixir of youth is probably stored... And that is why the elders of the Vakhtangov stage are so full of energy and life...
Yuri Yakovlev appears as the hero of Bunin's "Dark Alleys". A tired, trim old man with quiet, heart-tugging intonations is talking to the woman he loved and mercilessly abandoned thirty years ago: “Everything passes, my friend,” he muttered. – Love, youth – everything, everything. The story is vulgar, ordinary. Over the years everything goes away. How does it say this in the book of Job? “You will remember how water flowed through.” Nikolai Alekseevich looks at the beautiful Nadezhda (precise and subtle work by Lydia Velezheva) as if from the other shore, as if they were already separated by the waters of the Styx. So you look at the dear shadow and are upset by its excitement. This is how you say goodbye and forgive only before separation, which does not involve a date. Yuri Yakovlev - Nikolai Alekseevich walks away with a light dancing gait into the opening dazzling shining whiteness of the stage-sky...
As it turns out, benefit performances are a surprisingly insidious genre, akin to close-up photography. Both advantages and disadvantages are seen as if through a magnifying glass. To the credit of the Vakhtangov elders, most of these close-up
stand with shine. It's been a long time since Vladimir Etush played such a charming role as the old furniture dealer Gregory Solomon from Arthur Miller's The Price.
When asked about his age, he shrugs slightly: “Yes, my boy, I’m ninety.” He pauses and turns to the audience: “Almost”... He lightly winks at the heavens, slightly apologizing to the Almighty: “Well, will I stay here a little longer then? You do not mind?"…
The oldest actress of the theater, Galina Konovalova, chose Bunin’s story “Benevolent Participation” and with compassion, understanding and merciless sarcasm she told and acted the story about an old “former actress of the imperial theaters” who is going to perform at a charity evening. Shrugging her shoulders, she talks about how a critic from the front row shuddered at the romance “I would kiss you” and made a grimace, saying, do what you want, just not this! And how the critic miscalculated, because the actress was a resounding success. And Galina Konovalova, in a luxurious concert outfit, is solemnly carried off the stage by young extras, truly to the deafening applause of the Vakhtangov Hall...
Elena Dyakova
Benefit performance of Princess Turandot
Vakhtangov Theater is 90 years old
The 90th anniversary of Moscow's most romantic theater is celebrated today. And on November 11, the anniversary performance of Rimas Tuminas “The Pier” took the stage - a benefit performance of benefit performances, elegant and nostalgic. Played by Yulia Borisova, Galina Konovalova, Lyudmila Maksakova, Irina Kupchenko, Vladimir Etush, Yuri Yakovlev, Vasily Lanovoy, Vyacheslav Shalevich: the color of the Vakhtangovites of the twentieth century. “The Pier” is a collage of their unrealized roles and performances.
And according to the Tuminas formula - a mass for the theater.
By the way, the director’s group set the shower at five. Tuminas’s hand is most noticeable in the fragment “Favourable Participation”. Galina Konovalova's benefit performance was Bunin's precise and tender story about the annual (and only one of the year) performance of the elderly soloist of the Imperial Theaters at an evening in favor of the underserved pupils of the Fifth Moscow Gymnasium, about the months of rehearsals, about the concert outfit in which she looks like “Death gathered at ball". Ultimately - about theater as a drug and a monastic order. And about the innocent, elegant, crazy, everyday holiday of Arbat Moscow in the 1900s.
The extras of this holiday - student stewards, student enthusiasts, the “sensitive youth” of the 1900s with their jubilant applause (at the very end of the history of all that Moscow) are played by young Vakhtangov actors, turned into grotesque and touching figures, similar to extras in a St. Petersburg street pantomime in "Masquerade" of Tuminas. The soloist of the Imperial Theaters, as already mentioned, is Galina Lvovna Konovalova. She has been a member of the Vakhtangov Theater troupe since 1938. Galina Lvovna played a street boy in Cyrano with Mikhail Astangov in 1943 - and played duen Roxana in Cyrano with Maxim Sukhanov half a century later. (And ten years later she became a wonderful Nanny in Tuminas’ “Uncle Vanya.”)
The note of “Favorable Participation” is supported and translated into words by a fragment of “The Price” by Arthur Miller with Vladimir Etush in the role of a 90-year-old New York antique dealer. In the past - a sailor and acrobat, now a philosopher wandering the stairs of apartment buildings (however, not at all forgetting about profit), antiquarian Solomon evaluates not only a pile of antique furniture sold by an insolvent heir. In a brilliant Millerian monologue, he assesses the entire New York of the 1960s. His diagnoses fit today's Moscow like a glove.
This carved furniture is made to last: and therefore is not needed by people for whom the best consolation is to buy something new. This ebony table is frightening: “Sitting down at such a table, a person not only knew that he was married, he knew that he was married for life.” These Gothic sideboards and harps with a cracked resonator will not fit into modern apartments: the width of the doorways is not designed for them.
Things from “another world”, completed forever, are piled up on Vakhtangov’s stage.
Vladimir Etush plays the antiquarian-acrobat-philosopher, his peer, masterfully and with pleasure. There is something of the prop furniture, inappropriate in its perfection, in its homely, decorous, old-testament charm, unable to fit into the doorway of modern consciousness, in the play “The Marina” itself. You feel it when the gray-haired and straight Vasily Lanovoy in a top hat and white gloves walks to the ramp through a crowd of young actors, reading: “Long live the sun, let the darkness hide!”
When, amid fanfares, the breathtakingly elegant, elegant, as before, ominously animated millionaire Klara in the guise of Yulia Borisova is carried out on a palanquin (“The Lady’s Visit” by Friedrich Dürrenmatt). When Yuri Yakovlev, a retired general from Bunin’s “Dark Alleys,” comes on stage. And especially when Yakovlev, in the finale of “Dark Alleys,” reads to the audience from Bunin’s 2011 diamond octahist “And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn...”
The fragments of “The Pier” are heterogeneous and unequal. The appearance of Lyudmila Maksakova in “The Player” (Lyudmila Vasilyevna could certainly have played Polina, but she plays Grandmother), her imperious and victorious step, the gesture with which she also extracts from her immense black-brown muff a fox boa “with a muzzle” ( like a fakir to a snake from Khurdzhin) - everything promises a virtuoso Dostoevsky. But alas: Roulettenburg is drowning in the bustle of the stage. There is so much noise, as if a Cossack regiment was marching through a peaceful German resort, sowing panic and creating a popular popular legend for two centuries...
In general, the anniversary “Piertain” touches the viewer. And, undoubtedly, it fulfills one of the key tasks of culture: to exercise the public’s ability to respect.
Vakhtangov's 20th century, paraded and divertissemented before the viewer in the brilliance of eyes and gray hair, feathers on hats and fake diamonds, in the brilliance of experience and plastic arts, Pushkin and Bunin, is impossible not to respect.
And thanks to all of them for their supportive participation in our little life.
MN, November 14, 2011
Dina Goder
Benefit wreath
Rimas Tuminas came up with a great idea - to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Vakhtangov Theater not with another unbearable reincarnation of “Princess Turandot”, but with a performance consisting of benefit performances of the stars of the troupe who have worked on this stage all their lives. The premiere was played consecutively on the 11th, 12th and 13th - on the very day of the 90th anniversary (at the Vakhtangov Theater the devil's dozen were always considered a lucky number). The performance, called “The Pier,” consisted of nine mini-performances that can be arranged in a bouquet in different compositions and even in different sequences. It’s not for nothing that the program here looks like a set of postcards, where each is a separate mini-benefit program. This is understandable: most of the episodes are built around the oldest theater artists, who last years very rarely go on stage. It’s all the more amazing how they - and above all the actresses - look.
Yulia Borisova, who has been working at the Vakhtangov Theater for almost 65 years and played her last premiere - “Dear Liar” - in 1994, appears on stage not as a rich old woman (Durrenmatt’s “The Lady’s Visit”), but as a radiant princess Turandot in a golden outfit. A familiar voice with capricious intonations leaves no doubt that it is she, although it looks like a miracle: slender, with a dazzling smile, using a conversation about a prosthesis to wave in front of her flabby partner (who was actually just born when Borisova was already working at Vakhtangov Theater) with long legs. Irina Kupchenko in De Filippo's "Filumena Marturano" looks on stage as if she is about thirty years old, I have never seen such a young, playful, dancing Filumena on stage - the heroine has three adult sons and is usually played as a respectable matron, albeit with a frantic disposition.
The director understands what his task is this time and “turns off Tuminas” as much as possible, that is, in most scenes he takes his mocking eccentricity into the background, and only builds an effective frame for the beneficiary. Each of the half-hour mini-performances is not just an excerpt from a famous play, but a complete composition, which means that its hero has the opportunity to either go out alone or surrounded by extras from the back of the stage to the enthusiastic applause of the audience, or to leave spectacularly (many “corps de ballet” "carries away in his arms). For some, Tuminas even comes up with a throne-like chair in the center of the stage, around which the whole action revolves.
But the best in this performance are not those episodes in which middle-aged actors show that there is still gunpowder in the flasks, but those where they are not afraid of their age, laugh at it, and at the same time at themselves. Where they accept themselves as they have become today. Like 89-year-old Vladimir Etush, who plays the role of old furniture dealer Gregory Solomon in Arthur Miller's The Price with his irresistible old Jew charm and charming slyness. (“Gold, all the women have always been happy with me, what can you do,” he says to the young heroine to the laughter of the audience.) And when the young partner, looking at the antiquarian’s papers, asks in amazement: “Are you almost ninety?” - Etush easily answers: “Yes, my boy,” and, turning to the audience, spreads his hands again: “Yes.” And the audience bursts into applause, understanding, among other things, that the difficult life of the former acrobat and then merchant Solomon is nothing against the real life of Vladimir Abramovich, whose father, a businessman from a small town, was imprisoned twice during the Soviet years, and the actor himself managed to graduate from foreign language and go to war, was seriously wounded, survived, was discharged for disability, and only then did he enter the Shchukin School.
IN " Dark alleys“Yuri Yakovlev comes out not as a youthful military man, like Bunin, but as himself, a tall, intelligent old man with a waxen face and an instantly recognizable quiet voice with soft intonations. With a small beard and a civilian coat, if he resembles anyone, he most likely resembles Chekhov, whom he played in 1965 in the play “My Mocking Happiness.” Yakovlev looks like a man already very far from the excitement of old memories of abandoned love; he already lives in some other, his own world. The story of the beautiful Nadezhda, whom he met 30 years later, hardly bothers him, but only makes noise somewhere on the periphery of his consciousness, like waves rustling, interspersing episodes of a performance. And the way Yakovlev leaves the stage - into the whiteness of the sky that has opened in the depths, without looking back, with an unexpectedly light, waltzing gait - looks more piercing than any strain.
Well, the most delightful episode turns out to be Bunin’s “Favourable Participation” - a story played out by 95-year-old Galina Konovalova about the excitement of an old, long-non-acting actress invited to participate in a gymnasium charity matinee. It must be said that Konovalova, unlike the other stars of this performance, was never Vakhtangov’s premiere, she almost never played major roles, but right now, in her tenth decade, her theater suddenly found herself needed like few others: after all, her fearless love for eccentricity perfectly coincided with in the manner of the theater's new artistic director. In “The Marina,” Konovalova, surrounded by silently bustling youth, plays and reads Bunin’s story with his delightfully unmodern intonations, lightly, ironically, with a caustic understanding of the psychology of the little actress - no matter how funny and at the same time bitter she may look.
Dressed up like “Death going to the ball,” she flies off the stage on the raised hands of enthusiastic students, and this acting happiness is the best that could be imagined for Vakhtangovsky’s stars.
MK, November 15, 2011
Marina Raikina
This pier with tears in my eyes
A foreigner taught a lesson to Russian theatergoers
90th anniversary of the Theater. Evgenia Vakhtangov will go down in history as the most risky project, making you look at the “Danish” events not at all as a holiday. With details from the academic theater - the MK columnist. All the cream of the national theater gathered in the hall, along with rare representatives of bureaucracy and business. IN Bolshoi Theater
it was the other way around. In Vakhtangovsky - artistic directors, directors, artists, directors' corps and even scenery manufacturers - everyone is invited to the anniversary. Kisses, hugs (after all, everyone is your own), anticipation of the holiday. And so it began.
Rimas Tuminas, heading Vakhtangovsky for the third season, desperately decided to swim across the current. He offered the Russian capital and its theatrical (and not only) elite a spectacle with the main idea - the human factor. The same one that in Russia, in its state mentality, has long been neglected. Here, the actor’s personality and memory became the fixed idea of “The Marina,” a performance specially prepared for the anniversary. Nine actors, nine brilliant names that make up Vakhtangovsky’s golden fund, ended up on stage with excerpts from plays that they dreamed of, but never played in their entire lives - that’s how fate turned out. And the beautiful Yulia Borisova would never have become Clara Tsakhanassyan (“The Lady’s Visit”), Lyudmila Maksakova - Countess Antonida Vasilievna (“The Player”), Yuri Yakovlev - Nikolai Alekseevich from Bunin’s “Dark Alleys”. And who knows if Irina Kupchenko and Evgeny Knyazev would ever partner in “Filumena Marturano”, and Vladimir Etush with Gregory Solomon in Miller’s “The Price”? How many chances does Galina Konovalova have to play a former artist of the imperial theaters? In her chic years - the artist is 95 - they were equal to zero. At the end of “The Pier,” people literally rushed to Konovalova: “Galina Lvovna, you are amazing... At your age!”
What years?! Stop it!
- the old actress responds to compliments in a ringing voice. - I accept gratitude in puppies, money and furniture.
This lady has a lot of humor.
And on the stage, which director Tuminas built in the style of silent films, she shone.
The unforgettable smile of Vyacheslav Shalevich in the image of Galileo, the courage of Lyudmila Maksakova, who appeared as a Gogol countess. Vladimir Etush receives applause literally after every remark of his old appraiser, and it is clear that he is a luxurious artist, and better than the director of the House of Actors.
In the finale, the music of Faustas Lathenas seems to be all tense, as if before a throw, the organ will hum, and a huge sail will unfurl on the stage, on which the portraits of the departed Vakhtangov members and the founder of the theater himself - brown-eyed, with foppishly slicked hair - Evgeniy Vakhtangov will tremble and sway in the wind. Of course, such a philosophical metaphor cannot but evoke emotion and stir up feelings. “The Pier” turned out to be a fairly universal invention of Tuminas, like a Rubik’s cube. Excerpts with other wonderful actors are already being prepared, in particular, Makovetsky, Sukhanov, Aronova, which will be included in the already repertoire “Pier”.
OpenSpace.ru, November 18, 2011
Alexey Bartoshevich
Requiem by Rimas Tuminas
For the anniversary of the Vakhtangov stage, the artistic director of the theater staged a play with the ambiguous name “Pier” for its old luminaries.
Sitting in the hall of the Vakhtangov Theater at the play “Pier”, staged by Rimas Tuminas for the ninetieth anniversary of the theater, I recalled the story told by Laurence Olivier in his autobiography.
In 1925, young Olivier accidentally overheard a conversation between two elderly actors backstage. They remembered someone they respectfully called "The Old Man." Do you remember what the Old Man did in the fourth act of The Merchant? And at the end of “Richard”?
In the theatrical lexicon, “old people” are something more than artists of venerable age who have served on the stage for fifty years or more. Every troupe had old actors, but few had “old men.”
Old luminaries, drivers of the crowd of choreographers, a living legend of the theater, the embodied memory of the great and forever gone theatrical times. They are the concentration of the best, most beautiful features of every nation. I saw with my own eyes (I was six years old) how, having met Vasily Ivanovich Kachalov on Gorky Street, walking to the Art Theater from his Bryusov Lane, people stopped, took off their hats and respectfully bowed to the one who, by his very existence among them, proved that he was not everything is still withered in Russian culture and Russian life. In the way they greeted the actor, there was neither the fanatical ecstasy of frantic fans, nor the curiosity of ordinary people who had met a celebrity - they would have something to tell their neighbors. The eyes of passers-by shone with what could be called awe.
Over the years, there have been more and more people of retirement age in our theaters, and fewer and fewer “old people”.
The problem is not so much for gerontologists as for cultural historians.
Where is the snow of yesteryear? Where are the “old people” now?
One after another, the current Vakhtangov luminaries rise to the stage to play the desired unplayed role, a role that is an unfulfilled dream. This does not mean that the heroes of the anniversary do not have an acting future. Some of them will probably play more than one role. Tuminas says goodbye not to Shalevich or Etush, but to the amazing generation of Vakhtangov elders. With a few exceptions (Maksakova), they have nothing to do in his theater.
The entire journey of this generation, from its very first steps, passed before my eyes. I remember how in Moscow they started talking about Etush after his hilariously funny Lownes in “Two Gentlemen of Verona”, how the name of Yulia Borisova, who played in the dramatization “On the Golden Bottom” based on Mamin-Sibiryak, thundered for the first time, like them - Ulyanov, Grekov, Borisova, Shalevich , Gunchenko, Yakovlev, Gritsenko, young, shining with talent, full of fresh strength, poured out in a crowd onto the stage in the performance that became the debut of a generation - the naive and beautiful “City at Dawn”. It was as a generation that they then conquered Moscow. And they remained her favorites for many years.
Moscow loved the actors of its many theaters with all its soul, but in very different ways. Vakhtangovtsev - with special tenderness. No one knew better than them how to brighten dull or terrible everyday life, to impart to life the spirit of an elegant holiday (who more skillfully than the Vakhtangovites knew how to wear bow ties or breathtakingly elegant dresses?); no one was able with such skill to make you believe that the world is good, beautiful and full of all kinds of pleasures that you need to be able to enjoy. That all fears are in vain, all hardships will eventually pass - and in general everything will work out and work itself out the best way. In times of all sorts of trials, which history has sent to the country in abundance, people needed just such a message. But only for the time being. The decoration of reality, as has happened more than once, turned into its embellishment. The performances of the Arbat Theater began to resemble luxurious confectionery products. There were exceptions (productions by Pyotr Fomenko, some works by Vladimir Mirzoev), but they were few.
The actors of the Ulyanovsk generation were and remained masters, but their brilliant art could not help but be affected by the spirit of aesthetic isolation that reigned in the theater.
And now, burdened with years and fame, having become Old Men in the Irving sense of the word, Vakhtangov’s luminaries took to the stage to play their cherished (who knows, maybe their last) roles in the play with the ambiguous name “Pharty”. Vasily Lanovoy reads Pushkin, Vyacheslav Shalevich plays Brecht, Lyudmila Maksakova - Dostoevsky, Yulia Borisova - Durrenmatt, Vladimir Etush (amazing!) - Arthur Miller, Galina Konovalova and Yuri Yakovlev - Bunin.
The highlight of the whole evening was, without a doubt, Yuri Yakovlev in “Dark Alleys”. You suddenly understood what a great actor is in the true, and not in the mass-cultural, hackneyed sense, how irresistibly simple and beautiful, how pure and holy theater addressed to the human heart can be.
We will forever remember the last gesture of the old man leaving into an unknown space. He turned around halfway, glanced into the darkness of the hall, paused for a second, raised his cane, and again moved there, into the depths of the stage, into the unknown space of eternity, dare we say - into immortality. There was not so much the pain of unfulfilled happiness as a calm readiness to come to terms with fate sent from above, the farewell wisdom of Shakespeare's Prospero. You were visited not only by melancholy that a wonderful generation is approaching an inevitable end (God bless them all), but most of all by gratitude for the light that they have given us for so many years and continue to give.
Now the artistic director faces a difficult task - to continue the work that he successfully began: to lead the theater out of a dead end, to discover in the Vakhtangov tradition what connects it with the director's theater of our time. Without breaking the thread that runs from “Princess Turandot,” remember that Vakhtangov is not only a carefree and ironic play with ancient masks, but also the tragic grotesques of “Eric XIV.”
What has already been done on a new stage for him (“Troilus and Cressida”, “Uncle Vanya”) proves that, in spite of everything, this goal can be achieved. First of all, because Vakhtangov’s actors of different generations are very good. It’s absurd to doubt the capabilities of a troupe that includes Makovetsky, Sukhanov or, for example, Lydia Velezheva (for me, I’m ashamed to admit, it was somewhat of a surprise that Velezheva played almost on an equal footing with Yakovlev: that’s what it means to be on stage next to the Old Man) .
Tuminas staged an elegy performance, a farewell performance to the old people of the Vakhtangov Theater and thereby to the great theater of past times, the theater-messiah and savior of humanity. This theater was irresistibly beautiful, but there is no return to it.
The performance is based on the works of F.M. Dostoevsky, F. Durrenmatt, A. Miller, A.S. Pushkina, E. De Filippo (2h50m) 16+
Artistic director of the production: Rimas Tuminas
Directors: Vladimir Ivanov, Alexey Kuznetsov, Vladimir Eremin
Artists: 20.12.2018
Yulia Borisova, Lyudmila Maksakova, Vladimir Etush, Vasily Lanovoy, Irina Kupchenko, Evgeny Knyazev
and others S
There are no dates for this performance.
Please note that the theater can rename the performance, and some enterprises sometimes rent out performances to others. To be completely sure that the performance is not on, use the performance search. Review of "Afisha": and walks to the incessant applause of the touched public. A flurry of applause falls on Yulia Borisova, who has not appeared on stage for a long time, who reigns and enchants in “The Visit of the Old Lady” based on Dürrenmatt, and on Vasily Lanovoy, reading Pushkin, and on Lyudmila Maksakova, who appears as the Grandmother from Dostoevsky’s “The Gambler,” and on Vyacheslav Shalevich in the role of Galileo from Brecht's play. Vladimir Etush is magnificent in the role of old Gregory from “The Price” by A. Miller, every line of his colorful character is a pure pearl and causes joyful laughter from the audience. Irina Kupchenko and Evgeny Knyazev brilliantly, highlighting only the most important thing, fly through the play by E. De Filippo “Filumena Marturano”. With bated breath, in ringing silence, the audience listens to Yuri Yakovlev, who so simply and wisely plays in “Dark Alleys” according to Bunin.
This is a performance of luminaries. The Vakhtangov youth are modestly crowded into the background, it cannot be otherwise: the role of the young here is admiration and admiration for the great departing theater.
But the real discovery and triumph of the performance is Galina Konovalova in Bunin’s dramatized story “Favorable Participation.” We can safely say that the actress, who had never played leading roles and was not famous, achieved real success at the age of 95. She plays an old singer, a forgotten former prima, who only lives from Christmas to Christmas, since it is around Christmas, once a year, that she receives an invitation to give a charity concert for high school students, and this concert is the anticipation for it, the preparation for it - becomes the main event of her life. Galina Konovalova’s performance amazes with its ebullient energy and combination of contrasts: sadness and irony, the subtlety of inner experiences and grotesqueness, ineradicable female coquetry and self-irony. The hidden meaning of the performance is revealed: the soul of the actor knows no age. The thirst for creativity is insatiable.
The artistic director of the production is R. Tuminas. Directors: A. Dzivaev, V. Eremin, V. Ivanov, A. Kuznetsov. Artist A. Jacovskis. Costume designer M. Obrezkov. Composer F. Latenas
Elena Levinskaya
Participating in the performance: 
A week has passed since that unforgettable evening when I had the good fortune to attend the play “Pier” at the Theater. Vakhtangov, but he still stands before your eyes and makes you think about many things, about the undisturbed values of the artist’s words and play, about the beauty of the classical repertoire, which has not been amenable to modern reading.
You can apply many colorful epithets to the performance, but I will highlight two: unique and sad. The uniqueness of the action on stage is the participation in it not of one great actor, but of a whole constellation of great masters. Rarely does a theater boast that so many recognized audience favorites perform on its stage. All of them devoted many decades of their work to the theater, and I would like to believe that the traditions of great directors continue in the theater, and the love for their theatrical home unites and supports the entire troupe. Perhaps the brilliant idea of Rimas Tuminas is precisely this: to show not only the magnificent stars of the theater, but also the amazing studio atmosphere that was inherent in the Vakhtangov theater over the years.
The performances of this theater have always amazed us with their theatricality, festivity, and jokes on the topic of the day. But serious psychologism is also inherent in the theater. And in this production we see on stage small performances, different in spirit, each staged for its own “one actor.” The appearances of all the middle-aged masters are accompanied by applause. Everyone is great. You can grumble a little for different reasons - this mini-performance can be shortened, this one can be lengthened, and these ones can generally be swapped, and the music in the finale can be muted a little. And yet four hours pass in one breath. This is a meeting with a real Theater that has not lowered the bar and respects its audience. Bravo to Vladimir Etush, Galina Konovalova and Yulia Borisova! This is something sparkling and unattainable in terms of the level of play! And when later, at home, I found out about the age of these Artists, all I could do was bow low to them from the waist! Separately, I would like to highlight Vasily Lanovoy, who briefly appears on stage to read Pushkin’s poems. But how does he do it! There is so much tragedy and sadness in his words and appearance. I haven't had goosebumps in a theater hall for a long time. Thanks to him and everyone for these goosebumps.
There is a lot of humor in the performance, and yet at the end of the performance I was haunted by a feeling of aching sadness, sadness for the passing of Art. The performance began on a sad note - with the performance of a prayer, and ended with a huge fluttering curtain, on which portraits of the famous Vakhtangovites appear and disappear. What is this? "Gone With the Wind"? But the young artists in the first scene pray that we do not forget those who created the Russian performing arts. Now, in the age of television and films with special effects, I would like to believe that the Theater is alive and there is someone to continue its traditions. Thanks again to Rimas Tuminas for his brilliant production.
ATTENTION! The deadline for booking tickets for all performances of the Vakhtangov Theater is 30 minutes!
Winner of the MK Theater Award Season 2011/2012 in the category "Best Performance"
Winner of the theater award "Theater Star" in the category "Best Acting Ensemble", 2012
Laureate Stanislavsky Foundation Awards in the “Event of the Season” category, 2012
Winner of the theater award "Highlight of the Season" (season 2011 - 2012)
To the 90th anniversary of the State Academic Theater named after Evg. Vakhtangov.
Performance in 2 acts based on worksB. Brecht, I. Bunin, F. Dostoevsky, F. Dürrenmatt, A. Miller, A. Pushkin, E. de Filippo.
The anniversary performance "Pier" is not a traditional event for the 90th anniversary of the Theatre. It is rather a need to pay due respect and admiration to the actors who devoted their entire creative life one theater - the Vakhtangovsky. Their service constituted its history and glory. What is an anniversary? This is the shore, the pier to which the theater - the ship - is moored.
On its board are inscribed from time to time the dates 60, 70, 80 and finally 90. Who are its passengers today? Actors different ages, talents, role. They are a team, and on November 13, 2011, leaders stepped onto the captain’s bridge, whose skill and virtuoso acting became a legend: Yulia Borisova, Lyudmila Maksakova, Vladimir Etush, Vasily Lanovoy, Irina Kupchenko, Evgeny Knyazev.
In this benefit performance, everyone has their own theme, their own hero, their own confession.
A creative life was lived in the theater, which became a temple for them, and the anniversary performance was a mass in memory of those of its builders who are not with us today, and those who are rightfully the pride of the Vakhtangovites.
This is a mass for young people who continue the work of luminaries.
This is a mass for all parishioners - spectators.
This is the theater's offering to the future.
Dear viewers, the program of the performance offered to your attention is not final. The theater reserves the right to perform not all parts in one evening, change the sequence of parts, and also make adjustments to the cast of performers.
Duration:3 hours 45 minutes (with one intermission)
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