Russia (bbabo.net), - Marina Brusnikina's performance on the Small Stage of the Theater of Nations is the first production of Shpalikov's latest script "Jump-jump, the ceiling collapsed". Written in 1974, it was still unknown to the viewer. The title from a children's rhyme - about a catastrophe after innocent pranks - accurately reflects the plot.
The life of a small family of a simple class: the mechanic Yura, the janitor Anya and their eleven-year-old daughter Ksenya, are written out with light, precise strokes. An ordinary evening that ended in a drinking bout, a domestic scandal with a call to the police, an arrest, a trial and a sentence: a year of imprisonment, the meaning and logic of which no one understands. A disaster that has broken out over people, from which there is no return to the past. It is this thought about the illogicality, randomness of the chains of events and actions and the irreversibility of the collapse that seems to be one of the possible answers to the question of how the dramaturgy of half a century ago resonates in the modern consciousness.
The chamber story on the chamber stage begins with cleaning in the house - the heroes, still nameless, wash the stage with mops. The text is read in its entirety, with detailed lyrical remarks by Shpalik. Brusnikina is known for her sensitivity to the word and the ability to work with it. Her actors do not literally illustrate the text, but seem to easily arrange it for the stage, graphically outline the characters and the lines of their interaction. Because of this, the production acquires lightness, expressiveness and restraint.
Three who are drawn into the funnel of events, and participants in a private disaster - grandfather, neighbors, colleagues, police, random passers-by. Daria Kalmykova and Alexandra Ursulyak, who have already taken place in the profession, play a duet of mother and daughter, and Daria Vorokhobko is from the younger generation of the Brusnikites, all other female roles. Artem Bystrov as Yura, the head of the family; Rustam Akhmadeev and Artem Tulchinsky are a series of male images.
For each of them, the game is a complex, shimmering connection and disconnection with their hero, and getting used to his personality, and distance with her from today's day. Now it is difficult to imagine life without almost private space, when neighbors are involved in scandals and holidays, when a saleswoman is asked to remind her husband of something, and a neighbor is asked to send her daughter to a boarding school. And the boarding school itself with living parents is now nonsense. And such independent, desperate children like Ksenya, who are able to break through the prison gates or go to another city to their grandfather, are also in the past.
It is nothing that space on the stage is fluid, changeable, indefinable, where the house ends and the outside world begins. Communal nepotism, bringing to mind the line of Boris Ryzhy: "How well we lived badly."
And the main thing remained untouched by time - human feelings and relationships. Xenia Alexandra Ursulyak in a short red coat and a white domed hat with her desperate, selfless love for her father, with rage and defenseless cravings, alternating in her attitude towards her mother, is the painful center of the performance.
Daria Kalmykova, energetic, confident, victorious at the beginning and confused, broken by her guilt, bent over, as if from a blow to the stomach, from loneliness and pain in the finale. Artem Bystrov's Yura is a handsome guy with golden hands, a frantic and generous soul, demanding happiness for all mankind and able to escape from prison in order to see his daughter on New Year's Eve. How these loving, honest, good people suddenly stupidly and irreparably managed to scatter their family and home.
Behind each hero there is more than his immediate stage existence - like the fate of grandfather Xenia, beautifully played by Rustam Akhmadeev, when he listens to the song "Katyusha" in a restaurant, and an unnamed war enters the plot. As in the scene of a prison meeting between husband and wife, when they silently look at each other for several seconds before he throws the table away and leaves - and in these seconds all their unspoken love stands on the stage as the third and main character. Like miniature characteristic sketches by Daria Vorokhobko, which clearly show how her beer saleswoman is in love with Yura, or like neighbor Valya, a fashionista and a hoarder, because of which the scandal began, sympathizes with Anya and awkwardly tries, if not to correct, then to help somehow .
"Mom," Ksenya asked when they went on. "And to sell beer, where do they study?" "At the university," Anya said. "At Moscow State University, where else?"
The main thing remained untouched by time - human feelings and relationships
There are no villains, all ordinary people are good, only for some reason life turns black and shrinks like a burnt leaf. Marina Brusnikina shows the characters to the viewer, as if on a screen, alternating plans, allowing either to empathize with them, or to ironically distance herself; the genre ranges from melodrama to everyday sketches, from nostalgic comedy to parable.
The performance is deceptively simple, its themes eluding the final fixation. And this is the consonance of the director's language with the type of Shpalik's artistic consciousness, supposedly simple and clear, in fact - deep, excitingly alive and absolutely modern.
bbabo.Net