golden masquerade
The grand climax of the theatrical season, the Golden Mask Festival, opens on Wednesday, March 29 at theaters all over Moscow. Schizophrenia, indecent opera, Chekhov and puppets — here’s the best of Russian stage condensed into three short weeks.
TEXT FRANCIS MERSON feedback
The Golden Mask Festival has been around for over ten years now — a long time in the microcosmic history of contemporary Russia — and represents the creme de la creme of Russian theater. If you’ve been too busy watching Dom-2 to make it to the theater this season, the Golden Mask is your chance to redeem yourself, as it serves up a convenient three-week overview of only the most outstanding productions. The participating theater companies compete for a total of 36 awards, which encompass all aspects of theatrical life, from acting to puppet design. Needless to say, it is a Herculean task to get all these theaters in one place at one time, let alone meet the elaborate staging needs of each participating company. Two of the most promising Petersburg participants have thus preferred to perform outside of the official festival period. Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims” was sung by an itinerant Mariinsky at the end of February, to fit into the schedule of uber-conductor Valery Gergiev, while Boris Eifmann’s “Anna Karenina,” the strongest candidate for the Best Dance prize, has already thrown herself under a train for the last time at the Theater of Operetta. The Golden Mask proper begins on Wednesday 29, opening at the Gorky MKhAT with Kirill Serebrennikov’s staging of “The Forest,” a production which has received all possible critical accolades, and is the top pick for Best Play and Best Director. Serebrennikov’s main conceit in this piece was to transpose the action of Ostrovsky’s drama into Brezhnev’s Russia, whose atmosphere of stagnancy and bored perfidity is a mirror image of the stifling milieu of land-owners and merchants depicted in this 1870 play. It has been a fruitful season indeed for Serebrennikov, who has also been nominated for “Izobrazhaya Zhertvu” (Playing the Victim) by the brothers Presnyakov, the standard-bearers of Russian post-modernism. This newest work, which plays on April 9, is typical Presnyakov fare, employing their hallmark “plot-collage,” where events are organized by association, rather than chronologically, leaving viewers baffled as to what actually happened. Away from the MKhAT, the Moscow mania for all things Japanese has infected even the most sacred of the Russian classics. Yuri Pogrebnichko stages a samurai production of “Uncle Vanya” at the Theater Near Stanislavksy’s House, where the eponymous hero’s pistol is replaced by a samurai sword, with which he takes a few misguided thwacks at the professor. Over at the Praktika Theater, winner of last year’s Golden Mask award for innovation, Ivan Vyrypaev, stars as actor and co-writer of “Existence No. 2,” a play apparently sent to him by a schizophrenic patient of a mental hospital. This all reeks of literary hoax, and my hunch is that Vyrypaev was afraid of being institutionalized himself if he claimed authorship of this deeply oddball play. In a similarly avant-guarde vein is “Between Dog and Wolf” at the Formalnyi Theater, a free interpretation of Sasha Sokolov’s Joyceian novel, with suitably shambolic set design and a surprise cameo by Pushkin. Director Andrei Moguchy is an old hand at Sokolov, having won prizes in Russia and abroad for his production of “A School for Fools.” But let us not forget that the Golden Mask is as much a festival of opera and dance as it is of drama. The Luna Theater will be co-opening the festival on March 29 with a modern dance performance entitled “Doors.” This very contemporary tribute to Terpsichore is set to music by Aphex Twin, among others. Another top dance number is “The Death of Polypheme” at the Ten’ Theater, in which the “primo” of the Russian stage, Nikolai Tsiskaridze will be strutting his stuff. On the opera front, the Helikon’s artistic director Dmitry Bertman has resurrected Sergei Prokofiev’s opera “Tale of a Real Person,” dovetailing it with “Alexander Nevsky” and naming the resulting hybrid “Fallen From the Sky.” A doubtful enterprise perhaps, but this may be the only chance you’ll have to see any part whatsoever of this never-staged 1948 opera. But the Golden Mask prize for scandal would have to go to the Bolshoi Theater’s “Rosenthal’s Children,” which caused an international furor last year, when Vladimir Sorokin’s “indecent” libretto was made public. The theater was blockaded by a motley band of wowsers and reactionaries, who were shocked that someone might utter a single word of “mat” on the hallowed stage of the Bolshoi. The lighter side of opera is represented at the festival by the Theater of Operetta’s lavish version of “My Fair Lady,” which will satisfy even the most ravenous appetite for schmaltz. The Golden Mask program is so wide and varied that any journalistic discussion of it is bound to be cursory and alas, incomplete. But one show it would be a shame to omit is Danish director Jack Matissen’s charming puppet version of “The Ugly Duckling,” whose characters communicate entirely in quacks, squeaks and whistles. It would also be remiss not to commend the agreeable city of Omsk, which has outshone all other regional participants this year, gaining three nominations. The Omsk Academic Theater stages “The Cherry Orchard” at the Pushkin Theater and August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” at the Vakhtangov Theater, while Gorky’s “The Eccentrics,” by the Fifth Theater company, is on at the Moscow Theater of Young Spectators. The Golden Mask Festival is perhaps the only chance for regional companies to gain wide acclaim for their efforts, and Muscovites, in turn, should leap on the opportunity to see what has been brewing this season in theaters outside the capital. The prize ceremony is scheduled for April 17, at which the coveted Golden Masks will be distributed. But this is a mere formality – the real winner in this theatrical extravaganza is the fortunate audience. For a complete schedule, log on to www.goldenmask.ru. |
