Amazing performance Black milk, or Excursion to Auschwitz becomes a real fascinating history textbook for viewers. The production is based on a play by the famous European playwright Holger Schober, which was translated into Russian by Alexander Filippov-Chekhov. The director of the project, Tatyana Mikhailyuk, noted that, first of all, her performance is aimed at a teenage audience, schoolchildren of the present time. In history lessons they all get acquainted with important dates, events, facts bloody wars. But for teenagers, due to their inexperience and a completely different way of thinking, talk about terrible military operations and the realities of the Second World War remains in the form of dry numbers and does not find an emotional response.

This is how it is depicted at the beginning of the action and main character dramatic narrative, schoolboy Thomas. Just like his peers around the world, he gets acquainted with information about the war in a textbook, and it leaves him practically indifferent. But everything changes when a teenager goes on an excursion to Auschwitz, one of the most terrible death camps, a place that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. The terrifying atmosphere of the place, the special energy make for young hero all the stories he encountered on the pages of the textbook were visible.

His impressions are strengthened by his acquaintance with the Pole Tomasz, a security guard working in the current museum created on the site of Auschwitz. The teenager learns from the guard's stories that the history of Tomas's family is directly related to the activities of the camp. So gradually the boy reveals to himself real story country, which is expressed not in numbers and dates, but scary stories people who survived the horrors of war. To evaluate original work director and creative team, you should definitely buy tickets to the play Black Milk, or Excursion to Auschwitz.

A play in two acts.

Characters

« Small", she's Shura, 25 years

Levchik- 28 years

Cashier- 45 years

Mishanya- 35 years

Aunt Pasha Lavreneva- 50 years

Petrovna- 70 years

Drunk man

People with toasters

Where to start? I do not even know. From the name of the city maybe? So it’s not like it’s a city at all. And not even an urban-type village. And not a village. And it’s not a populated area at all. This is the station. Just a station. The station is somewhere in the middle of My Vast Motherland. Just in the middle does not mean in the heart. After all, My Vast Motherland is a strange creature and, as you know, its heart is in its head. Well, God be with her. With your head, I mean. We would like to decide where we are. According to my calculations, this is the area of ​​the lower back, sacrum, or even. ...No, not even or, but that’s how it is. That's where we are. Right in the middle of it. At the epicenter. It’s painful that everything here is somehow different... Even very different. It’s not the kind of thing that makes you want to scream, yell, scream, just so that you can hear: “What an ass. ...What an unscrupulous young lady you are, My Immense Motherland!” Will he hear? Will he understand?

Will you think about it?

Don't know…

And this station is called “Mokhovoye”. The correct way is not indicated on the sign. And why? The trains don't even stop here. Cargo-passenger only. And “fast”, “branded” and all sorts of others rush by without slowing down. Or even adding, so as not to inadvertently see something like that. Not like that, I mean. Not all trains stop here either. Only at 6.37 and 22.41 east direction and 9.13 in the western one. That's all.

Act one

The station is a wooden house with a slate roof near the railway track. November. Cold. There is already snow on the platform. And in the snow the night trails right to the station doors. It's not that cold there. One might even say it's warm.

Well, shall we go in? Let's warm up?

Let's go in. Nothing like it. Not shameful. The walls have been recently painted. Three years, maybe no more. Dark green paint, true, but, as they say, it depends on the taste and color. ...Well, God be with them, with the walls. What do we have here? Is there somewhere to sit? Eat. Two sections of station seats right in the middle. In one of the chairs, the one closest to the iron stove, reminiscent of a column embedded in the wall, a man is sleeping. His head is thrown back, his mouth is wide open. Such a small man, frail, but a good drinker. Sleeping. And let him sleep. Let's leave it for now. Let's take a look around first. So. Near the stove there is a woodpile, a pile of garbage, some papers. Next, a word is scratched on the wall. Thank God it's decent. Then a plywood tablet with a stenciled schedule. Arrival, departure, parking time. In the column where the parking time is, there are only one numbers everywhere. Logical. Those who didn't have time are late. Anyway. What's next? ABOUT! Automatic storage room. As many as six cells. They don't function and are terribly dirty. It's a pity. Otherwise. ...Next is an iron door. Fresh. Unpainted. A meter from the door there is a barred window. This is the cash register. A piece of paper is glued to the glass. And on the piece of paper there is an inscription: “ENDED.” What ended, why, and when is not specified. However, this is none of our business. A woman is sitting outside the window. Cashier. She is the same age when Baba Berry again. It has a lining from Chinese leather coat and felt boots. The face is smeared with a French cosmetic face mask made in Poland. Knitting in my hands, boredom in my eyes.

Only the man occasionally makes inarticulate sounds, and the knitting needles click in the hands of the cashier. And there is nothing else. It’s like it’s all drawn, not alive.

Who else is this?

Let's see…

The door opens. A man and a woman appear. Both are young, sleek, dressed up. In their hands are armfuls of checkered “Chelnokov” bags. Three pieces in each hand. With all this, the woman is also pregnant.

WOMAN (“a” - squeals, “g” - squeals, “i” - squeals) . Well, the Hermitage in general. I almost gave birth entirely. What the hell, we just got out of this hole.

MAN (“a” - squeals, “g” - squeals, “i” - squeals) . It's okay. The road has been mowed down.

WOMAN (puts bags on the floor) . How do they even live here? Everyone's fucked up. Ugh! Have you seen their nails, what are they like?

MAN (puts bags on the floor) . What?

WOMAN. They have fingernails in general. ...You won’t see this in the Hermitage. Like these blacks have nails. Did you see the nails?

MAN. Well damn. Did not see…

WOMAN (looks at the seats) . Do you think it’s okay to sit here?

MAN. What?

WOMAN. An infection, maybe. Sticks. Gangrene. Tuberculosis. (Patted her stomach) . I was told it is not recommended. Vaccinations and antibiotics are not allowed.

MAN. Lay down some newspapers and sit as long as you like.

WOMAN. ABOUT! Exactly. In which?

MAN. In the extreme.

The woman reached into her bag, took out a pile of newspapers, and covered the seat next to the man with them. She sat down. Sniffs.

WOMAN. It feels like it smells like your armpits. Grandfather was there alone, remember?

MAN (studies the schedule, indifferent) . Well. …Which?

WOMAN. With a beard, apparently. I don't remember, in short.

MAN. Well. So what?

WOMAN. He's so hot, you can't imagine how.

MAN. How?

WOMAN. Damn, I was sniffing. Damn, I was breathing every other time. Damn in one time. I'll die, I thought. Gas chamber. Why the hell did you get out of this hole, one wonders... Are you all...

MAN. They screwed up normally, what are you doing?

WOMAN. How much is normal?

MAN. Fine.

WOMAN. What's the secret, damn it?

MAN. Five bags, let’s say, were thrown away, is that okay?

WOMAN. Nevermind! Powerful.

MAN. Well, okay...

SILENCE

WOMAN. Damn it! In fact, there’s a pull from somewhere in the armpits. Some kind of hemorrhoids. Fuck it! (She took out a bottle of perfume, without looking, sprays it around herself. Her hand hits the man’s open mouth. He looks. (Eyes pop out of their sockets) . Squeals. Jumps up. Runs out into the street.)

MAN. Little one, what are you doing? (Looks at the man) . No fa. ... Why are you here? (Fits.) Hey...Grandfather...Alive at least? (Pokes the man with his foot.) Why are you scaring people? Hey...need a toaster? For free. Hey. ...Quacked, or what? Hey...Are you going to take the toaster or not?

SMALL (she opens the door and looks in carefully) . Lefty, who's there?

LEVCHIK. Uncle…

SMALL. Dead?

LEVCHIK. Bukhonky.

SMALL. Which?

LEVCHIK. Drunk.

SMALL (comes in) . Cattle! Because of him I almost didn’t give birth, damn it. Settled here.

LEVCHIK. Where were you looking?

SMALL. What did I see? She sat down and that’s it! Now I have no more problems with how to look at everything. What does he want here?

LEVCHIK. Who's sleeping?

SMALL. Let him go home to bed.

LEVCHIK. Tell him.

SMALL. Speak for yourself. I need him. Bite again, you bastard!

LEVCHIK. How?

SMALL. With your mouth!

LEVCHIK. Yes, he has no teeth. And it never happened, I guess.

SMALL. Like this?

LEVCHIK. So it is. Look for yourself.

SMALL. Is it true, or what? (Fits) .

LEVCHIK. Well, look, look.

SMALL (plugs her nose and looks into the man’s mouth) . That's right. Where does he have them?

new ones first

What connects the heroes of the play “Black Milk or an Excursion to Auschwitz” - the German teenager Thomas, the Polish policeman Tomasz and 16-year-old Isabella? Past. Namely Auschwitz (in Polish) or Auschwitz (in German).
And this past is terribly terrible, so much so that at one stroke it knocked down the arrogance and show off from a German teenager, who, having been there, no longer wants to be German, does not want to speak his native German language and burned his passport.

A Polish policeman hates Germans, considers them all Nazis, and this guy happened to be at his station. The policeman himself is the grandson of the Polish woman Marika and the German soldier Peter, who beat and raped the girl, and after giving birth to her daughter, she could not survive this horror and committed suicide.
This misfortune is written about in the diary, which is also the protagonist of the play, telling about the past in Marika’s words.
After reading the diary, even though it is hidden in the attic, the family secret will be discovered first by Tomas’s mother (who considered his grandparents to be his parents), then by Tomas himself, for whom such a truth came as a shock, and now the diary has been found and read by Isabella, the daughter of a policeman, who wants to be a singer and dreams of singing in a huge hall like in Germany.
The time of action is today, or yesterday, or several years ago, in general, almost our days.

A very difficult story that, with the help of a diary, intertwined the present with the past. And it’s all the more surprising that it’s packed so succinctly into just 45 minutes - exactly that there's a performance going on.
The scenery is ascetic - a dark room and three structures with doors - but nothing more is needed.

This performance was staged by the young director Tatyana Mikhailyuk at the Teatrium and, as Teresa Durova said, will soon be in the repertoire.
Recently on the OSD forum there was a discussion about where to watch performances, on the native or non-native stage. So it seems to me that this performance would be appropriate at any small venue, the main thing here is the atmosphere.

The actors are all great! but I would like to mention the youth
So tender and dreamy Daria Lukyanchenko in the role of Isabella and Marika.
And the sharp, anguished Thomas, played by Egor Dyatlov (the son of Evgeny Dyatlov, they are not at all similar, it was interesting to watch).

After the performance there was supposed to be a discussion, but the topic was so heavy that the whole audience fell into thought. The only one important question sounded - why is the title “black milk...” But it turns out the play ends with Paul Celan’s poem “Fugue of Death” - “We drink the black milk of the dawn at night...”
But then, maybe, at the end of the performance, the actors or the voice-over would read at least a quatrain?... In general, it would be necessary to tie it in somehow, because if it weren’t for the question and answer, it would not be clear what this is in the title.
It was also interesting to read the play later, which Teresa Durova offered to send by email to everyone.

September 2002

Maya Odin

"Black milk" in white clothes

The production of the play “Black Milk” by the young but already popular Vasily Sigarev became an indisputable creative success for the Theater. Gogol and actress Alla Karavatskaya.

The first premiere of the just-begun theatrical season was played at the Theatre. Gogol. Main director theater Sergei Yashin staged “Black Milk” by Vasily Sigarev. The event is, although it happened within the walls of the most stationary and not the most popular theater in Moscow, it was pleasant. According to preliminary repertoire requests, theater season 2002–2003 promises to be focused on contemporary drama, and a start has been made.

Sigarev, who became famous in Moscow for his play “Plasticine”, which tells the story of the death of an orphan teenager who was overwhelmed by life, presented to the audience no less dramatic story. In it, the young author set his sights on greater things, trying to create a dramatic portrait of the Russian hinterland. Sigarev begins his “Black Milk” with a monologue to the audience, which is delivered by the main character, who is not the most pleasant, as it turns out later. the main idea The monologue is as follows - what an unscrupulous young lady you are, Russia... It turns out, however, that everything that happens in the play does not confirm this thesis, but casts doubt on it, although from the outside the guy, in general, is right. He pronounces his accusation while standing in a remote, spit-stained station with tattered benches and shabby walls, leaning against which a dead-drunk man is sluggishly stirring...

The proximity of the Kursk station, its spirit, which is clearly felt, one has only to step out onto the porch of the theater. Gogol, the performance is very beneficial. The scene, as if continuing the unpleasantness of the station, is decorated with a line railway, running into the distance, semaphores, sidings and other attributes of the right-of-way. The young man and girl who find themselves there are cynical traveling salesmen. They are actively selling the never-drying poor inhabitants of the half-station a thing that they do not need for nothing - a super-toaster made of super-plastic.

At first, the plot of “Black Milk” balances on the brink of black humor and parody. The guy smartly describes the advantages of owning a toaster to the cashier, Aunt Lucy. Meanwhile, people who have already bought their goods in shabby jackets are en masse dragging stupid toasters back and, with difficulty finding obscene words, asking to take them back and return the money. Levchik and Small (the nickname of his pregnant girlfriend), who themselves do not have too much vocabulary, get rid of them as best they can, quarreling with each other along the way. “I’m tired of it, damn it!”, “I’m sick of it!”, “Fuck off!”, “Give me some menthol!” – artists Alla Karavatskaya and Ivan Shibanov did not have to pore over memorizing the text. The author very convincingly presents to the clean public the wretched language of small traders, the slang of a station cashier, the stupid tediousness of grandmothers and the aggressive ravings of drunken men.

However, the humor, albeit blackish, did not last long - the time had come for the young lady to give birth. And not in a paid clinic, as she had planned, but right in the outback, with the help of a home-grown midwife. And then transformation happens. Otorva, who had just disdained even sitting down on a station bench and habitually sent those around her away, finding herself in a hopeless situation, appreciated the simplicity and breadth of soul of all these Russian aunts, grandmothers and men. How they ran around, how they forgot their squabbles and other important matters! How they drag milk, repaired strollers and blankets, how they tremble over someone else’s baby... With the same vividness with which the playwright depicted their drunken antics, he depicts all the hidden humanity of these inhabitants of a godforsaken stop.

Alla Karavatskaya plays the breakdown in the soul of her heroine so that the audience freezes. Out of concern for Melky and her newborn daughter, the ladies take out their handkerchiefs, and in the audience there hangs that very nervous pause for which an actor only has to go on stage.

The actress’s heartfelt performance, as well as occasional appearances by the old people of the Theater. Gogol, who perform their drunkards and shabby old women with great enthusiasm, somehow smooth out the undemanding and at times too banal direction of Sergei Yashin. Chief director of the Theater. Gogol heavily seasoned the production with piercing effects that absolutely shocked the audience - snow falling from under the grate, the song “And it’s snowing...” and the slow dance of the heroes on the proscenium. But even such direction could not spoil Sigarev’s play.

By the end, the capital's theater goer is convinced that not everything is as black in our unwashed Russia as it sometimes seems. And who, if not Vasily Sigarev, a native of a small Trans-Ural town and a student of Nikolai Kolyada, would know this for sure.

Vremya Novostei, September 9, 2002

Pavel Rudnev

Frogs with wings

At the Theater. Gogol staged Vasily Sigarev's play "Black Milk"

Moscow theaters continue to test the strength of modern drama. Vasily Sigarev, a student of Nikolai Kolyada from Nizhny Tagil, became famous for the play “Plasticine”, which received the Anti-Booker Prize in manuscript, and was later staged by Kirill Serebrennikov in the spirit of cool social art. The collection of young authors, where Sigarev’s play was published, was later called “Plasticine,” denoting a whole direction of modern literature, trying to mold at least some image of the modern world from the ruins of the empire.

Another play by the fashionable Sigarev, “Black Milk,” was taken on by two Moscow directors at once: Sergei Yashin and Mark Rozovsky. The performance of the first has already been released, the second is promised to be shown early next year. It must be admitted that Sigarev no longer has such plays as “Plasticine” - at least among those known to the theater public. And “Black Milk” is the most accessible; it was published in the anthology “Modern Drama”. I would like to believe that “Milk” refers to student texts, in which the playwright is just mastering the methods of satirical “chernukha”. The play was created according to a proven scheme: yet another everyday horror is demonstrated, accompanied by the cynical reactions of the characters. But the ending is sentimental: you are invited to believe that in the soul of any frog, birds rustle their wings.

Taking on “Black Milk,” director Sergei Yashin decided to play the play in the old, perestroika traditions: this is how problematic plays about youth, “Trap No. 26” and “Sports Games of 1981” were staged, and this is exactly how “Little Vera” and “Sports Games of 1981” were filmed in films. My name is Harlequin." At a distant stop (on the stage there is a dirty and unheated ticket office with broken seats) sellers of Chinese toasters arrive - Levchik (Ivan Shibanov) and his pregnant girlfriend nicknamed Melky (Anna Karavatskaya). They try to sell fake toasters to poor residents, then fight off the defrauded buyers. Small gives birth to a girl and falls in love with the Russian wilderness, persuading Levchik to stay here forever. Then they beat her, and the emotional impulse quickly fades away.

Sergei Yashin, following the play closely, fills the performance with so many parodic elements that the plot ceases to be at all plausible. On the stage - zombified shuttles with memorized advertising slogans, a boorish Soviet cashier, drunks who can't stand on their feet, a communist with the inscription Zuganov on her back, a drunkard truth-teller with a hunting rifle, a whining old woman in a quilted jacket and Aunt Pasha, a kind Russian woman. All this supposedly naturalistic surroundings ten years ago was common material for sketches from the life of the Russian hinterland in the hands of “sold-out” satirists.

In “Plasticine” - a play about a teenager dying in a mossy, nightmare world and managing to curse him in his own way - Vasily Sigarev showed real life, filled to the point of nausea with violence, lies and stupidity. In “Black Milk,” he set his sights on a plot from the life of “the children of the underground,” but got scared and rushed back to the cliches of low literature, retaining authenticity only in the language of the characters.

The old woman begs to return her money for the toaster, and yesterday’s scoundrel Levchik soon gives it back in a slight surge of compassion. The drunkard, who had just been singing vile songs, is already firmly on his feet and sobbing loudly, apparently over the fate of Russia. A girl, sucking either a menthol cigarette or a sweet chupik, gives birth to a child after a series of abortions and claims that God came to her to ask her “not to be a bitch.” Sometimes it seems that this play was written not by a young man, but by an evil old moralist, who was fed up with these damned youth, and the vile Democrats, and the bastard Americans. small drops brutal truth drowning in abundant waves of sentimentality. They cajole and console with tears of tenderness here more often than they shock.

Not only the Mokhovoye station was lost in time, but also the director Sergei Yashin. It’s as if he is trying to prove that life has not changed since the creation of “Little Vera”: young traders with equal zeal sing both the old-fashioned hit “Earth in the Porthole” and Zemfira’s ultra-modern song. At other moments, retro music from the 70s is heard from the theater speakers, something about “white snow.”

For some reason, Sigarev settled his sellers of Chinese toasters in Moscow. Perhaps in order to support another common myth: about a respectable but shitty capital and a drunken but blissful outback.

MK, September 10, 2002

Marina Raikina

Everyone at the Gogol Theater is fed up

Shop tour to the province

The Gogol Theater began its season with the premiere of Vasily Sigarev’s “Black Milk.” The performance became a clear breakthrough for the theater - the same as “Plasticine” by the same author became a year ago for the little-known Roshchin and Kazantsev Center for Drama and Directing. Directed by Sergei Yashin. Artist – Elena Kochelaeva.

Well, damn it, give it to me!

And you, damn it, got me. To the very tonsils.

Shut up, you deer with branchy antlers!

Yes, you yourself are a wet girl...

Modern vocabulary is evident. Just like its carriers - scumbags from small trading business ( Ivan Shibanov and Alla Karavatskaya). Sweet couple in puffy red jackets, making her shopping tour, she ended up at a godforsaken stop, where the TV doesn’t work, where there’s only one cashier (Natalia Markina) sells train tickets to the nearest settlement and she is also leading the genocide of the Russian people through the production of dubious quality vodka. The couple made a lot of money by selling Chinese toasters to the unenlightened population, and this very population does not know what to do with this miracle of household appliances - either bake buns in it, or hammer in nails.

The piquancy of the situation lies in the fact that the capital’s female scumbag is eight months pregnant. The beautiful blonde and her trained accomplice-husband seem to not speak, but vomit words:

Well, damn it, you got me!

You yourself got me, head with anus!

Give me the bag! Why are you standing like a Kalmyk Jew in the Mongolian steppe?!

With their abomination they hit the hall from the very beginning - the young artists are technical, reliable, as if they themselves had gone through the marsupial school of the Luzhniki market. Against their background, the people from the outback look unconvincing in their rustic grief and are inferior in quantity to the quality of the younger generation of the Gogol Theater. However, due to the greater characterization of the characters in the play, Natalya Markina and Maya Ivashkevich(Petrovna), and also a drunk man in a winter coat lies very convincingly on the proscenium (Vladislav Tsyganov), from time to time singing something from the Soviet stage.

Sigarev’s “Black Milk,” like his “Plasticine,” causes shock, and some viewers cannot stand it and leave. But it is Sigarev’s drama production that allows you to feel the difference - what is the truth of life, and what is test-tube black stuff produced in large quantities in the capital. The truth pleases him with its simplicity of images and at the same time their depth. The second 50-minute act flies by unnoticed: the premature birth of a metropolitan trader clearly sets her mind straight. A frightening, godless theme appears and is completely unexpectedly resolved. Instead of a slobbering and at the same time pathetic appeal to the image of Christ as the only value of monstrous reality, a completely unexpected monologue appears: the heroine addresses him as “dear daddy,” and ends with a hysteria of hopelessness: “I wanted to fuck you.” The scene is shocking, but not blasphemous.

In the final cow's milk, spilled across the stage, as the hero says, turns black. The image allows the viewer's imagination to choose different versions blackness - from grief? out of despair? hopelessness? But it reflects the stars and the sky. Which means...

Kommersant, September 10, 2002

Influx of fresh milk

New play by Vasily Sigarev at the Gogol Theater

The Gogol Theater was one of the first to release the premiere at the beginning of the season. It was a production of the play “Black Milk” by the young but already popular playwright Vasily Sigarev. MARINA SHIMADINA attended the premiere.

“What an ass... What an unscrupulous young lady, my vast homeland” - the performance begins with these words. And I immediately remember the dirty and smelly passages in the Kurskaya metro area, along which the spectators, dressed up for the premiere, have to make their way to the theater, and at the same time the Russian classic, whose name the theater bears, with his “Where are you rushing, little bird.” After half an hour, you are finally convinced that nothing has changed significantly since then. Only instead of a bird or three there are trains invisible to the viewer, which rumble along the winding railway tracks, frozen on the stage in the form of a roller coaster, which in America is called Russian. Nearby there is a shabby wall of the station, two iron benches, on which you cannot sit without a newspaper underneath, and a ticket office window, above which the word “out of stock” is written in chalk, incomprehensibly referring to what. This is the Mokhovoe station, lost in Siberia, which, according to the playwright’s calculations, is not exactly the heart of our homeland, but an area somewhere below the sacrum.

It is to this hole that a couple of shuttle traders come from Moscow, under the guise of an advertising campaign, selling cheap Chinese toasters to the gullible population. The residents of Mokhovoy are almost Gogolian characters: both “dead souls” and “pig snouts” at the same time. And also a little Shukshin “weirdos” who, with a Berdanka in their hands, seek justice and with a bottle in their pocket cry for their souls. All this can only be depicted with the help of the grotesque. Director Sergei Yashin settled on a caricature. The conflict begins in the second act, when the pregnant shuttlewoman Shura unexpectedly gives birth and the meaning of life is revealed to her: black suddenly becomes white, the “pig snouts” suddenly turn out to be sincere people, and the former bastard life seems like a bad dream.

Alla Karavatskaya very convincingly played this transformation of a bitchy person, covered with kilograms of cosmetics and spouting slang words every word, the most abusive of which is “Hermitage,” into a proper, busy mother. But, to be honest, she looked more interesting before the metamorphosis. Together with Ivan Shibanov (husband Levchik), they acted out a kind of ritual, with swearing and singing Zemfira, where the fetishes of happiness are the notorious “menthol”, which the expectant mother inhales even between contractions, and “chupik”, that is, “Chupa-chups”. The transformed heroine, to whom the Lord God himself appeared during childbirth, abandons them as symbols of her former life, in which it is “fashionable to be bitches,” and is going to spend her “mown money” on restoring an abandoned sawmill, which, naturally, causes a protest from her a companion who has not seen God. The good impulses of the transformed woman cannot withstand the assertiveness of the arrogant husband, and everything returns to its place. Fresh milk from a broken can flows onto the floor and, mixing with dirt, quickly turns black. Such is the metaphor.

For the Gogol Theater, the appearance in the repertoire of a modern play by a relevant and even fashionable young playwright is, of course, an achievement. But the performance was unlucky in the sense that it would certainly be compared with “Plasticine” by Kirill Serebrennikov, based on a play by the same author who made the young playwright from Siberia overnight famous throughout the theater of Moscow. And the comparison will clearly be in favor of the latter. Not only is “Plasticine” a much more powerful, downright bleeding play, next to which “Black Milk” is just touching sketches (although this year Sigarev received another “Eureka” for it). Also, Serebrennikov’s production was distinguished by modern direction, and “Black Milk” was made well, but old-fashioned, “depictively”, as if it were a play based on to the same Shukshin. But, apparently, new drama promises to be an extremely fashionable phenomenon this season, since not only the Center for Drama and Directing, the Teatr.doc basement and the Moscow Art Theater, which is striving for progress with all its might, cannot do without it, but even the theater designed to serve railway workers.

Izvestia, September 11, 2002

Alexey Filippov

Time Machine

New premiere of the Gogol Theater

“Black Milk” is a new performance at the N.V. Theater Gogol. The production is directed by the chief director and artistic director Sergei Yashin, the main bets are placed on young artists - Alla Karavatskaya and Ivan Shibanov.

The Gogol Theater has never been among the best Moscow stages, but - despite a fairly large number of breakdowns - the overall quality of its performances remains equal. Especially against the backdrop of the current hack-work and aesthetic chaos.

“Black Milk” is an exemplary performance; it reflects many of the features of the theater on Kazakova Street. Sergei Yashin took the play by Vasily Sigarev - it is about the Motherland. On the one hand, the scene of action (a small station where trains almost never stop) is located near the all-Russian anus, right in the middle of our great and vast country. On the other hand, its inhabitants have preserved living soul, and this distinguishes them from residents of big cities.

On the one hand, permanently drunk, degenerate monsters live at Mokhovoye station. On the other hand, here are hidden sources of spiritual renewal, to which Muscovites abandoned to a stop by commercial interests fall. In a word, we have before us variations on the theme of rural literature, decorated with modern youth motifs and slang.

The result is a push-pull play: the author's sincere appeals to the audience coexist peacefully with caricatures of peripheral life and customs and poignant youth scenes. Judging by the money that young Muscovites are asking for their toasters (“in the city the same ones are sold for fifty rubles”), this is happening immediately after the last, democratic redenomination of the ruble. The theater did not play up this in any way, and in relation to today, the pricing policy of young heroes looks inappropriate.

The performance is true to the spirit of the play: it is quite good, a little archaic, sometimes entertaining, sometimes boring. The latter is especially noticeable in the second act, when the author revives the Muscovite heroine, who gave birth to a baby at Mokhovoe station, to a new life. Sergei Yashin is a thorough director: he took this feature of the play seriously, and the excellent young actress Alla Karavatskaya plays a convert to the true faith in the second act. It is difficult for her to do this quite convincingly - the text is too stilted. The acting that decorates “Black Milk” turned out to be blurry.

And this is very sad - Karavatskaya’s heroine, Shura (aka “Small”), stepped into the play from today’s street: angular, impudent, liberated, experienced in everything and, it seems, never having tasted the apples from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. .. Karavatskaya plays a modern Madonna, a girl without firm rules of life and without a screw. The actress has no cliches, she is absolutely natural, and her heroine is just as natural. In any case, until “Small” begins to talk about the revival of the village and spirituality.

Apparently, Sergei Yashin sincerely believes the words of the heroine: it is not modern, but quite worthy. So is his last performance- despite today's slang, he came to 2002 from another time.

The times when stage action was heavily overlaid with music, sets with vague urban-rural-industrial motifs were celebrated, and directors were not ashamed of open pathos and moralizing. Nowadays such things are not in fashion, but this does not mean that they should not exist. Moscow theater audience lives in different time: for some it’s 2002, some haven’t made it out of the early 90s, and some live among the ideas of the 80s and feel very comfortable in them.

Vedomosti, September 11, 2002

Oleg Zintsov

Moscow-Kursk

"Black Milk" by Vasily Sigarev at the Theater. Gogol

Director Sergei Yashin staged at the Theater named after him. Gogol's play "Black Milk" by Vasily Sigarev. It's time to be touched - the theater rearguard has already taken up the new drama.

We should remember what the Theater named after. Gogol. "A magnificent acting ensemble led by the brilliant Svetlana Bragarnik, the unique Olga Naumenko, the talented Oleg Gushchin - this is the Gogol Theater today. A unique repertoire that you will not find on any Moscow stage... It is difficult to imagine a modern theater talking about life, about the human soul..." etc. - this is all from the program for the performance, and you really are unlikely to find such simple-minded self-praise anywhere.

Not to say that the theater in the vicinity of the Kursky Station is a place completely forgotten by the public and criticism, but if Sergei Yashin had once again staged Tennessee Williams here, the matter would not be worth talking about, just as it was not worth it, so as not to go far for examples, “Night iguana", which was recently committed by Yashin at the Theater. Vakhtangov and can be fully characterized by one word: shame.

“Black Milk,” however, is an interesting premiere: not because the new drama can be played exactly the same as the old one (who would doubt it?), but because Sigarev and Yashin found a common pathos and a common language.

Vasily Sigarev, a 24-year-old resident of Nizhny Tagil and a student of Nikolai Kolyada, two years ago received the Anti-Booker Award for the play “Plasticine” - a depressing physiological essay about the horror and hopelessness of provincial life. Last spring, it was successfully staged at the Drama and Directing Center by Kirill Serebrennikov. “Plasticine” was sticky, heavy text that scratched like a clumsily opened tin can. “Black Milk” is written in almost the same language, organic, rough and at times scary, but in a different tone: a nightmare is a nightmare, and people are kind.

Plot: married couple Moscow peddlers, having landed in some Siberian hole and sold Chinese toasters to the local population, are waiting at the station for the return train. The defrauded residents timidly demand their money back, but are turned away. What follows is a drunken shooting from a gun, from which the pregnant businesswoman goes into labor - and now the deceived Aunt Pasha, having forgotten the insult, helps her as best she can, delivers the child and calls her dear, and the playwright starts a barrel organ about the cynical capital and the unwashed, but mentally generous Russia. In the second act, the heroine shouts that she will not go back to Moscow, that she has seen God, “she’s tired of being a bitch,” etc. Then the hysteria ends, and the heroes leave for the soulless capital, leaving at the station a broken can of milk, which is mixed with dirt and turns black.

It would be strange to share Sigarev’s pathos or not notice the banality of situations and generalizations, but for all that, “Black Milk” is an excellent and professionally made play, very integral, with a distinct intrigue, living language (Sigarev, in my opinion, has an absolutely phenomenal ear) , recognizable types and one honestly written character, which happily turned out to be an acting success in the play (Alla Karavatskaya in the title role).

The only trouble or irony is that this text seems to be specially intended for just such a premiere. In the Gogol Theater, metropolitan in its registration and provincial in essence, the plot instantly became a caricature. It’s rather boring to list Yashin’s directorial cliches, since there is nothing else in the play besides them, but for example, a mixed chorus of old women and drunkards, in response to Moscow rednecks, quietly singing “Hostile whirlwinds are blowing over us,” at once gives an idea of ​​both the theater’s staging techniques and about the general marginality of what is happening. It’s partly a shame for Sigarev, but the fact that “Black Milk” was staged this way and not otherwise has its own logic: with this play, it seems, no matter where you go, you’ll end up just like the hero of “Moscow - Petushkov” to Kursky railway station.

Grigory Zaslavsky

No gloss

“Black Milk” by Vasily Sigarev on the stage of the Gogol Theater

If “Black Milk” had turned out to be the debut on the capital’s stage of playwright Vasily Sigarev, one can assume that his fate would not have turned out so happily. But we have already seen “Plasticine”, staged at the Center for Drama and Direction by Kirill Serebrennikov. In “Plasticine,” Serebrennikov managed to find what distinguishes Sigarev’s plays from those that have long been dubbed “chernukha.”

In the play “Black Milk,” which was staged at the Gogol Theater by Sergei Yashin, there are almost no such differences to be found, so almost the main advantage becomes the author’s ear for street words, the same ear that has always been credited to Sigarev’s teacher Nikolai Kolyada. The playwright “transplants” modern slang into the play so that this speech does not seem alien, but becomes his own in the mouth different heroes. What is heard is not the successfully overheard words and expressions, but the speech itself, in its everyday wretchedness.

Even if “Black Milk” was written after “Plasticine,” in this play the traces of apprenticeship are more clear. “Plasticine,” in which the same rude speech sounds at every step, and the situations are harsher and more deadly, does not seem to be a hopelessly gloomy play, since its darkness, if you like, is illuminated by the tradition of hagiographic drama, and the death of the young hero does not look like a point in his earthly life .

In “Black Milk,” talk about God allegedly appearing to the young heroine does not inspire confidence. Yes, and it’s trivial to break the heroine’s consciousness in such a manner. As they said in Russia, “God is God, but don’t be bad yourself,” which can also be attributed to the art of drama, which requires much more serious justification for everything.

So, at the distant station “Mokhovoye” (by the way, a real one), which the author himself defines as the back of the vast Motherland and even its epicenter, young people, Levchik (Ivan Shibanov) and “Melky”, aka Shura (Alla Karavatskaya), land. They came here, not afraid of the weather, nor the distances, nor Shura’s pregnancy, in order to sell Chinese toasters to the people, which, of course, are superfluous in the poor life here. However, the business is going well and, probably, if trains from the station had run with Soviet regularity, the play would not have happened, and there would not have been a turning point in the heroine’s consciousness. But trains almost never run here, and therefore the young people have to meet the local people, who soon come to their senses and are in a hurry to abandon an expensive and unnecessary purchase. Then Shura gives birth, then she falls in love with this remote and clean corner, followed by the debunking of the dirty and spiritual life of the capital. And the stamp floats on the stamp...

In the streams of abuse, including obscene ones, it is still possible to make out that the young people do not hate each other as much as they try to prove to themselves from time to time. It’s just that their love today is rough, like life.

It is clear what could captivate the director in such a play. And what the director wanted to say is clear. And the complex in front of the province is familiar to many who themselves did not immediately move to Moscow or even lived in the capital all their lives. Another thing is that too direct moves and poorly adjusted “joints” provoke the same banal directorial constructions. Yashin’s success, of course, was the choice of actors for the main roles: Sergei Shibanov and even to an even greater extent Alla Karavatskaya are so devoid of “habitual ideas” that you take their performance at face value. Their cry evokes sympathy, and their experience again evokes sympathy and empathy. A recent student of Leonid Kheifetz, Alla Karavatskaya in the role of Shura is a real discovery of the season that has just begun. Vulgar and sincere, vulgar and simple-minded, cynical and in love, not losing hope for another life, today, as if she had just stepped off the train onto the platform of the Kursk station... And, not forgetting about all the shortcomings of the play and performance, you note that Yashin is not for the first time, a new name is revealed to Moscow.

He stages “Black Milk,” perhaps too straightforwardly, trusting too much in the text and the author’s word. The snow, which seems to be necessary for the plot, is too theatrical and, as a device, too hackneyed. But Elena Kachelaeva’s set was a success this time: just rails, just a wall, a lapidary structure, and finally, without any rags.

It cannot be said that even in the proposed circumstances of the play, the director was able to figure everything out. The crowd looks mushy for now, where it is difficult to isolate anyone’s voice, although it seems that it is from the crowd, from the “people with toasters” that Aunt Pasha (Anna Gulyarenko), the plenipotentiary representative of the Almighty in Mokhovoy comes out... But the sincerity that is in the theater refers to the values ​​of the past tense, it is still captivating. To captivate a story that is completely devoid of gloss is almost a hopeless task, but Yashin succeeded.

Century, September 27, 2002

Vera Maksimova

Why is milk black?

Director Yashin believes that the crowd is not cattle, but suffering people

The same Vasily Sigarev, the author of the gloomy, highly praised in the capital, now famous “Plasticine”, a young provincial playwright from Nizhny Tagil, who has now moved closer to his teacher and idol Nikolai Kolyada in Yekaterinburg, wrote a new play, gave it to the N Theater V. Gogol, and the dynamic and energetic Sergei Yashin, without wasting any extra time, staged the “opus” with an intriguing and frightening title.

The premiere was one of the first in the new season, successful and very noticeable even against the background of high-profile theatrical scandals in September. (As we assumed and wrote, the Yermolovites’ press collapsed on the illiterate and shameless performance about Pushkin by Bezrukov the father for Bezrukov the son, like a thousand-ton glacier. Barely shown, “Hamlet” in Hot Sauce was removed from the Moscow Art Theater repertoire.” And it flares up, gaining sound and fury current discussion about theaters - “passage yards”, of which there are more and more in Moscow, among them there are not only weak, poor and small, but also very famous, almost “untouchable” for criticism groups, where for mysterious reasons can now stage performances for almost anyone who wishes.)

The work of Sergei Yashin, talented and significant, correlates with many problems of the modern stage.

There is no doubt that there is now an overabundance of new plays and that they are actively making their way onto the Russian stage. Two thick magazines barely have time to print “products”. Two festivals specially dedicated to new dramaturgy and directing were born and, as soon as they emerged, they began to fight each other for a place in the sun. Aggressive, under the encrypted name "NO" (which means "New European theater"), with a "base" in the semi-inactive Center named after. Meyerhold, using the pens of critics and ideologists, attacks. The calmer and more thorough one, united around the Center for Drama and Directing by Alexei Kazantsev, works and produces performances one after another. (This year, Kazantsev and Roshchin, the masters - the leaders of the center - were awarded the prestigious K. S. Stanislavsky Prize.)

New plays with their geography of “corners”, the image of “asshole” Russia, which is “in the dark”, with their language - banter, slang, and even swearing - are clearer and closer to young directors. Peers and peers mainly set. Sometimes the implementation is carried out by the authors themselves, who claim to have the gift of directing. It is not surprising that performances turn out to be “equal” to plays, preserving and repeating their shortcomings, weaknesses, accumulated cliches, and “commonplaces.” There is also a type of performance where young directors seem to be moved by the work of young authors and stage performances “from their hunches and knees.”

Master directors rarely turn to new plays. Not keen or don't know how to place them.

Sergei Yashin is a temperamental master, furious, tireless, boyishly active, a loudmouth at rehearsals, and, oddly enough, already belongs to the older generation. His choice is rare and risky. The attitude towards the obviously capable Sigarev is enthusiastic, respectful and sober. Yashin gave the author of “Plasticine” not a small amount, but big stage. Not only was he carried away by the play, but he also appreciated it correctly. (Of course, it wouldn’t be bad if the literary part also contributed its share of editing to the process of internal work. The ear goes deaf, hearing endless “damn” and even worse! What subtext is there! The text itself and the meaning elude understanding. And a lot of lengthiness, lethargy. And it would not hurt to remove the story about the appearance of God to the woman in labor. new play there is no such God! However, as we know, the time of the great zavlits - invaluable internal editors, even co-authors of the playwright, remember Dina Schwartz at the BDT, Elizaveta Kotova at Sovremennik, Ella Levina at Taganka - has passed. Zavlit today - regardless of age and experience - “a boy or a girl for everything about everything.”) The new drama goes into life, bypassing the internal editorial work traditional for our theater both in Soviet and pre-Soviet times, artistic, not ideological editing. Is this why, while increasing in quantity, it does not grow qualitatively and increasingly reveals uniformity, cultivates and repeats itself?

Yashin the master acted as a kind of co-author of the playwright. Without touching the text with literary edits (which, I repeat, is a pity!), he rearranged the accents, mixed up the depressing similarities with Kolyada’s letter and highlighted in Sigarev’s play what is in it that is his own, valuable, his own. Thinly written everyday life was thinned out to transparency (although not as scary as in “Plasticine”); intensified and thickened the fantasticism of the play; conditionally decided the space with rearing in the black, twisted into a spiral by rail- artist Elena Kochelaeva; filled the action with cosmic hums (from trains rushing past); gave the performance the features of a modern parable. The story is about how two young and enterprising traders - he and she, whom chance brought to the distant Russian expanse, fool the local aborigines by selling them unnecessary toasters, and once in critical situation(the girl gives birth prematurely), rescued by one of the local residents, suddenly experience enlightenment, a return to goodness, - introduced notes of aching humanity and faint hope for our general revival. (Although, as expected in a new drama, the ending is hopeless, the moment of kindness passes, the heroes leave; unable to change anything either in themselves or in the terrible life that has opened up to them, they leave a broken bottle of milk for the newborn, which, mixed with dirt, turns black.)

In Yashin's play, the actors play wonderfully - to the limit of dedication, furiously and selflessly spending themselves. Performers of the main roles - Ivan Shibanov - Levchik, Natalya Markina - Cashier, Alexey Safonov - Mishanya, but especially Alla Karavatskaya (the current Nina Zarechnaya at the Gogol Theater) - a wonderful discovery of the last Moscow seasons, a tragic actress in full sense of the word, causing shock in the audience with a plea to stay, help people, start doing something in Russia. In the finale, she frightens by returning to her usual life, but not of her own free will. It is clear that the heroine will not be the same, but worse, more dangerous and cruel.

However, you feel the core of the performance, its justification and meaning not only through the main characters, but in the way Yashin decides the image of the crowd. Not everyday, not based on individual figures, although they are visible, and played, and remembered. Putting everyone into a kind of desperate and not embittered, suffering, groaning and somehow touching multitude, Yashin makes us remember not Kolyada and others, whose crowd was always rednecks, but the bright name Andrey Platonov who suffered for people.

Yashin's performance has already received the most flattering reviews. In addition - one more. After it, I felt the prospect of a “new drama”; for the first time I believed that maybe it would have a theatrical destiny, a life in time, for people, and not a short flash in the current troubled and difficult moment for Russia.

Culture, October 3, 2002

Irina Alpatova

Rollercoaster

"Black Milk" by Vasily Sigarev at the Gogol Theater

You have to start with yourself. Perhaps the only one of all the capital’s critics that I didn’t like too much was the play “Plasticine” based on another play by Vasily Sigarev, staged Kirill Serebrennikov, extolled to the skies by these same critics. Which doesn't mean the performance was that bad. It just didn’t work out, it didn’t hit. Happens. The trouble is that negative attitude spread to Sigarev himself. That’s why I had to go to the premiere of the next play by the young Nizhny Tagil playwright as if out of professional obligation, with a deliberate feeling of rejection. But it turned out differently: the carefully persecuted feeling of rejection of what was happening (well, you have to be objective, after all) by the end of the performance ran away on its own, dissolved without a trace. Even, I confess, in a single gesture with the entire auditorium I wanted to take out a scarf. And for a person who is not too sentimental in life, this turned out to be a revealing moment. Here’s the thing: no matter how much you praise the “modern play” in itself, it cannot escape the theatrical cloak. What is the cloak - such is the impression.

Such a personal preamble might not have been important if both the play itself, and the attitude of director Sergei Yashin towards it, and partly the actors themselves, were not imbued with the most serious confessionalism. The intensity of Vasily Sigarev’s desperate spiritual exposure seemed so enormous that it somehow subconsciously hinted at a provocative feeling. Is he really so pure and naive in soul, this young author? And how did he succeed in this in our cynical times? What if this story was constructed by him in the most masterly way? Detachedly and with knowledge of the matter - that is, precisely those sensations and experiences, feelings and actions that many, carefully hiding, yearn for? The question is also very cynical, but the critic is not from another planet. We have the right to be surprised and we have the right to hope for a negative answer.

Sigarev, by his own admission, fishes out his characters not from the fabulous “bottom”, but from the epicenter of the place below the back. It is there, according to the playwright, that present-day Russia resides with all its inhabitants. And the dialogues were overheard there. But, fortunately, the playwright is not on friendly terms with the notorious "verbatim". He not only mechanically records everything he has learned on paper, but puts it into the form of a work of art. Even if this artistry has a wormhole. He conjectures something, generalizes something, fantasizes about something. In general, he creates. The way he can. And therefore, his couple of untethered shuttle salesmen with goods - non-functioning toasters - are capable of not only swearing wildly, spitting through their lips, but also “seeing God.” However, you can refuse it, trampling the cross torn from your neck into the dirt. That is why the real inhabitants of the same God-forsaken Mokhovoe station, where the symbolic word “ended” is written above the railway ticket office, sometimes seem to be almost fantastic creatures. At least, from the point of view of civilized metropolitan residents.

So Sergei Yashin and set designer and costume designer Elena Kachelaeva, trusting the author unconditionally, create an almost cosmic ambience from this “epicenter” (remember what?) But this “cosmodrome” was abandoned a long time ago, and therefore turned into almost a mirage. The rail laying either ends abruptly into emptiness, or for some reason soars up and, bending, is ready to collapse on the heads of the aborigines at any moment. It looks like a high-tech roller coaster ride, but in Russian design, and, as usual, unfinished.

In the theater of Sergei Yashin (this means not only the Gogol stage) we are in Lately We are seeing “another life”. Sometimes exotic, sometimes chronologically and geographically distant, not ours. It takes, but more from an aesthetic point of view. Spicy music, dances, romances... In "Black Milk" Yashin was not afraid to get into this "epicenter" himself. And I was right. Perhaps in some ways he departed from his own usual methods and did it with obvious pleasure. And we, the audience, became not just detached and curious, but passionate. We didn't watch the characters, we believed them. Even their most ridiculous “twists”. Walking in step with Sigarev, Yashin plunged us into a terrifying “everyday life” (dirty benches, spit-stained floors, crumpled newspapers), but did not let us drown in it. And by putting Chinese down jackets, dusty padded jackets and shabby hats on the characters, he did not turn them into cattle. He printed that “you can’t live like this,” but opened the window to “you can.” He brought onto the stage an absurd crowd, inappropriately singing “Hostile Whirlwinds...”, and pulled out persons of “human nationality” from it. People like Aunt Pasha Lavreneva (Anna Gulyarenko) - a mother of many children, almost the Mother of God in almost hell. Or the nameless cashier (Natalya Markina), selling burnt moonshine and ready to hang herself because a passerby accidentally poisoned himself. And, mind you, all this is without obvious play - simply, in a human way, as in a normal Russian theater.

There is a special conversation about a couple of shuttles, Levchik (Ivan Shibanov) and Shura (Alla Karavatskaya). It’s easier for Shibanov. His Levchik is equal to himself - moderately cynical, moderately decent, knows how to disguise sympathy for his pregnant wife under obscenities, but also give a brutal rebuff to all her psychological metamorphoses against the backdrop of new motherhood. But Alla Karavatskaya is a clear discovery not only in this performance, but also in the general, often faceless mass of young metropolitan acting. And only thanks to her absolutely organic naturalness, her not hysterical, but such aching sincerity, all the complex and, at first glance, absurd spiritual ups and downs seemed justified and inevitable. But one could laugh: it’s no joke - quit a poorly established “business”, move to this Tmutarakan, restore some abandoned sawmill and live like that.

By the way, life nevertheless made its own adjustments to this naive romantic plot, getting rid of the excessively pink tones. Sprawled on the rails, Shura-Karavatskaya, not wanting to enter the carriage rushing towards civilization, will nevertheless reluctantly and heavily stand up, pick up her bags and, as if on a leash, reach for her rational husband. The roller coaster came crashing down with screams and screams. Shura will return to where “you have to be a bitch.” But for some reason it seems that she will no longer be a “bitch”. Just like her daughter...