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- Overdue man: "Another Theater" opened with a drama about the fight against the System
Overdue man: "Another Theater" opened with a drama about the fight against the System
Imagine: you come to the MFC to find out why the March pension was not credited to the card, and in the window you will find out that you have been dead for 40 days. Two classic Russian questions arise from this preamble: who is to blame and what to do? They will be answered by director Sasha Zolotovitsky, who, together with his brother Alexei, created a new "Regular Theater." The play "Overdue" became the first in his repertoire. The main role is played by actress Vera Kharybina, the widow of Igor Zolotovitsky and the mother of the founders of the theater. Izvestia appreciated the genre experiment.
The system is always right
Vera Kharybina read Gogol, Kharms and Kafka to her son Sasha. The boy was small, he didn't understand much, but he absorbed it. Then he grew up, became a director, looked around and, together with the playwright of Our Hetva (the literary pseudonym of Natalia Gerasimova, who declared herself at the Lyubimovka Festival of modern drama in 2024), staged a mystical satire about the great and terrible bureaucracy.
She has a special name in the play — the System. It is pronounced in a singsong, breathy voice and with deep reverence by all loyal subjects — employees of registry offices, district medical centers, pathologists, judges and policemen. The system does not malfunction. The system is always right. The system sets a new standard for a highly efficient life, where each individual should benefit society. Utopia of pure water. But what place does the System assign to the little man? The question is rhetorical.
There are three chairs on the almost empty stage of the space "Inside". Two young men and an elderly woman are sitting in line for an appointment with coupons in their hands. The last one, Baba Raya, came to the MFC to clarify a misunderstanding: her pension is being delayed. By simple clicks to the beat of chewing gum, the girl in the window solemnly announces: "I don't know who you're trying to fool here, but Raisa Fyodorovna has been dead for 40 days."
From this moment on, baba Raya begins her journey through the bureaucratic circles of hell, the atmosphere of which is much closer to Kafka's "Process" than to Dante's.
Sasha Zolotovitsky entrusted the main role to his mother, actress and teacher Vera Kharybina. An absurd pink hat on his gray head, large glasses on half his face, a plastic folder with documents pressed to his chest and a small body hunched over the years, from which a soft, apologetic voice emanates - that's the whole portrait of a modern Akaky Akakievich. The rest of the characters serve as a contrast, like the characters in the Wachowski sisters' films: black glasses, monochrome clothes, a straight back and an impudent smile on an impassive face.
Vladislav Sukhorukov, Elizabeth Damsker and David Sokratyan play several roles at once. However, there is only one System. For greater clarity, they deliberately twist their acting nature, so you don't always understand.: this is intentionally grotesque or just playing past the notes.
Baba Rai walks around the offices, presents certificates, proves that she is alive, tries to appeal to common sense. But common sense in the world of the System is a document that does not exist. You can't just say here: "Look at me, I'm in front of you." We need a paper confirming the obvious. And if the paper says that you are not there, then perhaps you really are not.
Prove that you're alive
This is how the everyday story of a delayed pension turns into a journey between life and death. And it's not by chance that Zolotovitsky collects a performance from those artistic worlds in which he grew up. From Gogol, there is a little man who is being crushed by a faceless machine, from Kafka, a maze of instances where each next step only leads further away from the answer, and from Kharms, the very impossibility of understanding where the funny ends and the scary begins.
At the same time, the director is not trying to make Baba Rai a heroine of social protest. She's not a rebel or a Don Quixote. She doesn't need to change the world at all. She wants to get a pension, water the seedlings, live out her life and quietly go to another world — to her husband and son. But in a human way.
— Wait, I'm growing seedlings. The best one... That's what everyone in the market says. That's my benefit. I'm alive, alive," Baba Rai mutters.
At the beginning, we both resent the mistake in the documents. Then we get used to her journey through the bureaucratic spiral. We listen to the next instructions, observe the representatives of the System, and laugh at the absurdity of what is happening. And then suddenly we discover that maybe there was no mistake.
The system was the first to notice something that people hadn't noticed. Or, if you look at it from the human side, you just thought the old woman was useless. The expiration date has expired, the person has moved to another column, and with it the obligations to him have ended. The bitterest thing here is not even that Baba Rai died. Death in the play generally turns out to be much less terrible than the indifference of the living.
The system does not allow mistakes. But it can still revise the utility coefficient. It is enough to submit an appropriate application and wait for a response at the place of residence, which, due to recent events, is located right at the cemetery site.
It is wonderful that it is there that the heroine meets with humanly warm attention from the undertaker. He drinks for the repose of the old woman with her. If they haven't had a funeral, at least there will be a wake. In a world where everything human has long been translated into the language of certificates, coupons, coefficients and electronic databases, this simple gesture suddenly turns out to be the most important.
The play begins as an absurd story about a woman who was mistakenly listed as dead by the System, and ends with a question about those who had already stopped noticing each other during their lifetime. Raisa Fyodorovna really died, but the scarier thing is that even before she died, no one needed her.
For some, the "Delay" will be nothing more than another performance, of which there are plenty in Moscow. But others will try to look beyond their nose and see a broken moth vainly beating against the walls of the System.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
