| Peer Gynt (BASED ON HENRIK IBSEN'S DRAMA)

Peer Gynt (BASED ON HENRIK IBSEN'S DRAMA)

"Peer Gynt" is a dramatic poem by Henrik Ibsen, staged as a play at Lenkom. The performance invites the audience to immerse themselves in mysterious world delusions, insights and wanderings of the protagonist, who appears before the viewer not as a folklore character, but rather as an archetype of a person, whose life path can be projected onto the life path of each of us. Mark Zakharov invited choreographer Oleg Glushkov to co-direct the play. The director admits that Ibsen's poem, although it became the beginning of a new dramaturgy for Norwegian literature, is quite difficult to understand and perceive by the general theater public. Therefore, I paid a lot of attention to its adaptation - I compiled new translation and a new stage composition.

The action of the play takes us to Norway first half of the 19th century century. Actually, it is from here that the long wanderings of the main character, Peer Gynt, begin. Also, with him, the viewer will have to visit the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean coast. Peer Gynt is the son of Jon Gynt, a man who was once respected and wealthy by everyone, but who has now squandered all his wealth and become an alcoholic. Per dreams of restoring his father's fortune, but daydreams, constant head in the clouds and arrogance prevent him from achieving his goal. A whirlpool of events draws Peer Gynt into a long journey, where he will meet the love of his life, lose her and find her again... The main character has a lot to learn and experience before the truth is revealed to him about what is really worth living for. Buy tickets to the play “Peer Gynt” to see this amazing spectacle with your own eyes, enjoying the magical world of Ibsen’s poetic lines.

Production: Mark ZAKHAROV and Oleg GLUSHKOV

Director: Igor FOKIN

Composer: Sergey RUDNITSKY

The performance is joint project LENKOM theater and MKAYANA production center.

Lenkom actors are involved in the play:

Peer Gynt: ;
Ose, Peer Gynt's mother: ;
Solveig: , ;
Father Solveig, stranger, doctor:
Ingrid: ;
Ingrid's son: Semyon LOS, Ivan SEMIN, Vasily VERETIN;
Anitra: Alexandra VINOGRADOVA;
Pugovichkin: ;
Grandfather of Davor, king of the trolls: ;
Mas Mon: ;
Gypsy: Alexey SKURATOV;
Hussein: ;
Small troll: , ;
Other characters: Stepan ABRAMOV, Anatoly POPOV, Alexander GORELOV,

Famous dramatic poem by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen Peer Gynt was first staged on the stage of the Lenkom Theater in March 2011. The premiere was sold out, and tickets for performance Peer Gynt were purchased by viewers many weeks in advance. Meanwhile, the permanent director of Lenkom, Mark Zakharov, admits that he encountered significant difficulties during the staging of Ibsen’s drama. The national flavor of the work made the play quite difficult for Russian audiences to understand, so great attention had to be paid to adaptation, using new translations and stage composition. The choreographer of the production was Oleg Glushkov.
The play Peer Gynt begins in the early years of the 19th century in Norway. From here began the long journey of the main character Peer Gynt, the son of the ruined drunkard Jon Gynt. Per dreams of restoring his father's capital, but his arrogance and impracticality prevent him from achieving what he wants. He begins his wanderings, meets love, breaks up with it and finds it again. Together with the hero, the audience will have to visit Cairo and the Sahara, on the Mediterranean coast, and in the end - find out the truth, for what it is worth living in the world.

Tickets for Peer Gynt in Lenkom

Peer Gynt. Lenkom Theater. Press about the performance

Culture, March 31, 2011

Natalia Kaminskaya

Walking for three sorrows

“Peer Gynt” was staged at Lenkom

“So I wanted to talk about Peer Gynt and some other people, without whom his unique life could not have happened. Just tell it in our own way, not too seriously, as best we can,” admits director Mark Zakharov in the program for the performance. It is as if he deliberately states that the usual Lenkom style with its craving for show techniques, with music and dance, with the habit of inserting a relevant word into the canonical text will remain in place. Ironically, as always, Zakharov calls his style not too serious. “Peer Gynt” on the stage of “Lenkom” looks energetic, the performance is very beautiful and plastically expressive, it is really not boring, it is devoid of depth. But this is a very serious and purely personal theatrical statement.

A mammoth of a poetic text, a play that the great Norwegian Henrik Ibsen himself considered a composition exclusively for internal, Scandinavian use, Zakharov turned into an elastic and fairly short two-hour performance. The hero (and the audience along with him) does not have time to “settle in” anywhere, he literally flies from place to place, from world to world, and, it seems, there are even fewer words in the play than movements and spatial transformations. But at some point you realize that the theater, with this very instant flipping through the pages of a huge play, captured the essence of the hero named Peer Gynt. A man in whom throughout his entire life nothing was settled, undefined, this classic “ prodigal son”, searching in vain for his own destiny.

In Ibsen's grandiose dramatic poem, epic is combined with sharp satire on contemporary to the writer society, a fairy tale goes hand in hand with a romantic ballad. But at the same time, the brilliant playwright (the play was written in the 60s of the 19th century) is already looking into the existential abyss. Where has this dreamer and fool visited: in a troll cave, in the Sahara desert, on the Moroccan sea coasts, in a madhouse in the city of Cairo... And he was everything: a pilgrim, a businessman, an “emperor” in the yellow house, and even a supposed “body” for experiments. He chased after everyone: from his fellow countrywoman Ingrid to the Bedouin Anitra, and in the end the only justification for his existence was Solveig, aged and blind, but never tired of waiting for him. Fearlessly pushing the boundaries of times, worlds and genres, Ibsen reflected on how, in essence, the human path is unsteady and elusive, how fate is unpredictable and how any, even the most good, deeds are punishable.

When composing his performance, Mark Zakharov makes his main character not so much Peer Gynt, who is wonderfully played by Anton Shagin, but the very space of existence, full of dark places and black holes. Scenographer Alexey Kondratyev is an equally important author here (he, like his teacher Oleg Sheintsis, is listed in the program as a production designer). Choreographer Oleg Glushkov is also very important. And composer Sergei Rudnitsky. From Grieg with his famous music for Ibsen’s drama, only “Solveig’s Song” remains in the performance, which is performed both in the original and in variations. The rest - partly in the live ensemble sitting on stage, and partly in the phonograms - sounds in different languages, and the ear catches either a Scandinavian motif, or an oriental one, or even some kind of “symphony” of a confused, lost soul.

The dark-clad scene contains a cube in the center that changes angles and positions. Either it will open as the warm cavity of a home, or as the gloomy receptacle of a house of sorrow. It will turn sideways and take on the outlines of a Scandinavian village building. Otherwise, he will look into the hall with a frontal plane, and we will see Malevich’s pure “black square”, this Suprematist fetish, which for more than a century has been carefully hiding its innermost meaning or its complete absence. The empty spaces of the stage are filled with picturesque peasants in white and militant young people - with the corps de ballet they energetically act out the “mass”, always hostile to the eccentric Peer Gynt. Trolls and “troll girls” (as they are called in the program), unkempt and with some suspicious stains of decay on their clothes, appear in the space of the stage, suddenly bristling with vertical black trunks hanging from the “heaven”.

Everything that happens outside the village that Peer Gynt left resembles both a terrible fairy tale and an existential “hole”. There is a smell of “turning around” here, the same Gogolian one that was present in Zakharov’s powerful play “Mystification” (based on “Dead Souls”). Around every turn, some kind of “undead” awaits the hero; everything in this unknown world is strange, scary and like an obsession. The seduced Ingrid appears more than once and more and more resembles Pannochka. Even the mother of the hero Oze, played by Alexandra Zakharova in an eccentric and at the same time poignant way, looks like a witch. Suddenly and sharply she changes anger for tenderness, affection for rudeness, casts a spell with her outstretched fingers and winks like a conspirator. Ivan Agapov plays several roles. From Solveig's respectable father, rightly concerned about his daughter's dubious choice, he turns into a sadistic doctor along the way. And who knows whether this is not the revenge of the unfortunate father, or whether this personified retribution was not imagined by Peer Gynt, who has long been living in neighboring worlds? For the border between the countries into which our hero takes us is, it seems, the border between this world and this world.

The conscious striving upward coexists here with an existential landing in an unknown place. Peer Gynt climbs onto the roof of the cube and hangs there as a lonely figure, as if hinting at Ibsen’s other heroes, Brand and the builder Solnes, individualist dreamers who never knew the absolute.

But Davorsky’s grandfather, the king of the trolls, also loves to climb, played by Viktor Rakov in the familiar, purely Lenkomov style of light cynicism. This grandfather is senile, despotism interferes with his childish desire for a confidential conversation, and I remember similar characters in Zakharov’s films based on Evgeniy Schwartz and Grigory Gorin, all these politicians and courtiers who so loved to communicate with the people in their own way.

Sergei Stepanchenko plays Button Man, and this role in Mark Zakharov’s play grows in volume. On the one hand, this Button Man is the embodiment of sad common sense, and here Stepanchenko uses all his signature Lenkomov gadgets: his uncle, with the indisputable confidence of a domestic burgher, teaches Peer Gynt to live. In this part of the role, he, like Davorsky’s grandfather, has comedic responsibility for the production. But there is little comedy in Zakharov’s play, much less than what the director accustomed us to with his previous works. So, along the way, the Button Man grows into a scary, semi-mystical figure of a guide, who seems to transfer the hero from world to world.

The very capable artist Anton Shagin, who has already played (and very interestingly) in “Lenkom” Chekhov’s Lopakhin, and who was remembered by moviegoers in the film “Hipsters,” embodies here absolutely modern man. One that has no supports, no core, but has a greedy desire to try, enjoy, taste. He seems like a good guy, he loves his mother the way he affectionately calls her a swallow. With what clear shining eyes Solveig looks at her. How bravely he goes to meet the guys who, he knows, will definitely beat him. And yet he is very quick in words and actions. He saw Solveig and immediately declared that she was the love of his life. Then, just as quickly, he was drawn to Ingrid. The frantic pace of the performance, the lightning-fast change of scenes, the huge play compressed into two hours deliberately add to us this unsteady impression of the figure of the main character. He is neither a fool, nor a scoundrel, nor a hero. He is nothing, this individual, undecided in anything, not caught up in anything, rushing through the ocean of temptations towards a foggy goal. Shagin talentedly, temperamentally and very accurately plays a substance of a completely modern nature waking up through his fingers. His hero does not even age physically - there are no wrinkles and gray hair. But we see how the plastic is gradually slowing down, how the eye is dimming.

But Alla Yuganova’s Solveig has been defined once and for all; she is a thin, slightly infantile, gentle girl who remains like that until final scene the return of the hero. There are no signs of old age (and here, willy-nilly, you will remember another Lenkom symbol of female fidelity, Conchita from “Juno” and “Maybe”). Three of the only, let’s say, “soulful” episodes of the play are associated with Solveig. When Oze's potential mother-in-law comes to her house, a wonderful, witty scene of two hearts uniting in the struggle for their beloved plays out between the women. The brief moment of living together with Peer Gynt in Yuganov’s forest hut plays like a moment of absolute happiness and bliss. Finally, in the final seconds of the return of the prodigal lover, the actress manages to convey a feeling of happy peace.

But it will only be seconds. It seems that we have never seen such quiet and ineffective endings from Mark Zakharov. Everything seemed to end in a breath. Having said in advance that he had decided to “look at my own life as chessboard”, the director kept his promise. I don’t know if he plays real chess well, but on stage his moves look thoughtful and correct. But the trajectories of life shining through them look like a ragged dotted line. And this is a completely modern sense of reality by an experienced master who has not lost his visual and hearing acuity over the years.

NG, March 28, 2011

Olga Galakhova

Soul of Wandering

Mark Zakharov and Oleg Glushkov staged the play "Peer Gynt" based on Ibsen's play of the same name

Henrik Ibsen's text calls for an ideological statement, not just a run-of-the-mill production. Working on it requires a certain special directorial attitude, a response to the challenge of the text. The attempt was made main director"Lenkom".

Mark Zakharov, in his speech published in the program for the play, notes precisely that the hero interacts not with other characters, but with the Universe, learning both the world and himself along the way. The director compresses the five acts of the play to the frame of the libretto, leaving the plot lines associated with Oze’s mother, of course, the love line with Solveig, with Ingrid, with the woman of the East Anitra, appearing through them general plot. Mark Zakharov also makes his own adjustments, quite significant, giving greater rights to the Button Man, who appears in the play from the very beginning, and not, like Ibsen, towards the end.

Sergei Stepanenko's button-maker is always next to Peer Gynt, he comments on his actions, he guides him through life: either he helps and rescues the hero from dubious circumstances, or he abandons him, irritated by Peer Gynt's willfulness. This Button Man seems to have wandered into Ibsen's forest from Brecht's theater, with texture Sancho Panza, he is at the same time Virgil on the journey of Peer Gynt, and a good friend from a Norwegian foothill village, paternally participating in the fate of the persecuted hero.

Peer Gynt is played by Anton Shagin, whose talent was revealed by Zakharov in the role of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, and literally next he offered such a complex role of the world repertoire as Peer Gynt. This doesn’t happen often in the lives of Lenkom actors. However, Shagin did not let his master down; he managed to play an ordinary person and at the same time extraordinary. This Peer Gynt is more of a lyricist than an Ibsenian rebel, the energy of youth and therefore self-affirmation overflows in him, and not vice versa, first the egoism of one’s self is affirmed, and then insight and repentance, as perhaps written by Ibsen. Anton Shagin makes us remember the idols of this theater Alexander Abdulov, Nikolai Karachentsov, Alexander Zbruev. Where Ibsen's hero defends the right to a superman, Shagin has a simple and understandable curiosity about life, presenting himself to this life without reserve. Where in Ibsen there is a challenge to the world, a justification for this rebellion, in Shagin and Zakharov, in the words of Pushkin, “sweet adventurism”, if there is a demon in this Peer Gynt, then it is some kind of charming hooliganism.

Zakharov constructs the performance in such a way that through the wanderings of Peer Gynt he gives the story of the heroes of the twentieth century. Mark Anatolyevich prefers to stage for the viewer, and not for a narrow group of savorers. The play contains the theme of the prodigal son, and the rebellious man, and the tender son, and the adventurer, and the wanderer, and the suffering hero, and the man gaining the final wisdom. All this is played without significance, but in a human way.

We also saw Alexandra Zakharova, who played the mother of Peer Gynt Ose, in a new capacity. The scenes with the mother in the play are full of some kind of heartbreaking tenderness, which was conveyed in the play, although Zakharov emphasized youth. Oze is not an old woman at all. It seems that she is about to jump off the roof where her son leaves her, calmly climb the mountains and catch up with him. The power of maternal love also lives in her: she desperately scolds her son, but just as fiercely protects him. Giving her image features of a pronounced character - from a black curly wig to eccentric antics with funny plastic surgery - the actress maintains the main condition: she loves her Pera as no one loved him in life, and she dies of loneliness when her son leaves the village. Per will carry his mother’s body like fragile porcelain, he will try with all his might to hold her in his hands, but she will still slip out of his hands and go into the ground (disappear under the stage).

In this production, Mark Zakharov is not afraid to reveal the sentimental in himself. “In our declining years/ We love more tenderly and more superstitiously,” the poet wrote. The return of Peer Gynt to Solveig is a poignant scene of the play. Zakharov does not age his heroes, although from the light touches we understand that their last meeting is a meeting of two old men, Solveig and Peer Gynt who went blind on the verge of death, but they remained young and beautiful for each other. It is easier to die when someone is waiting for you, when you have somewhere to return to, when you know that you are loved.

INFOX.ru, April 1, 2011

Alla Shenderova

Mark Zakharov gives second youth

Peer Gynt shot a fish in the sky. “Hipster” Anton Shagin has not lost his charm. And Mark Zakharov discovered a new Lenkom star.

Zakharov instead of Ibsen

The author of the first musicals in the Soviet theater, Mark Zakharov, has not lost his ability to combine bright, festive theatricality with an ironic conversation about what is happening in our society. Mark Zakharov staged the prologue of “Peer Gynt” as a parody of his legendary 70s performance “The Legend of Tila”: the guys dance to the village accordion, then the girls run out with baskets. From the midst of the people, a new Lenkom hero is emerging, who will continue the work of Abdulov, Karchentsov and Yankovsky - Anton Shagin's Peer Gynt.

Cheerful and irrepressible, he manages to shoot a fat herring in the sky, feeds the villagers tales and does not lose his mischievous smile even when they surround him with clubs. In a word, this Per - brother Russian Petrushka and Ivan the Fool. One can only admire his energy, charming buffoonery and excellent physical shape (he fights, tumbles and screams, hanging upside down as if he were not a living actor, but a doll on springs).

He is very modern in his worn leather jacket and treacherously sagging pants. And the whole Ibsen story about a hero endowed with superpowers, but never deciding what to use them for, turns out to be completely modern and recognizable, colored with typically Lenkom colors. The villagers' well-performed songs and dances are interrupted by the dark humor of Pugovichnik (Sergei Stepanenko), who announces to Peru that he is a mistake of nature and must “go to be melted down.” Dilute musical part There are also funny squabbles between Per and his mother Oze (Alexandra Zakharova), who brands her son with a silvery, broken voice and immediately, without changing her intonation, begins to admire him.

Of course, in this “Peer Gynt” there is not a trace of Grieg’s opera (although there are musicians sitting on the right of the stage, every now and then weaving the motif of Solveig’s song into their melodies). And from Ibsen only the names of the characters remained. Mark Zakharov radically rewrote the text.

“The path of glory lies ahead, I just haven’t decided where to start,” says the blue-eyed skank. Not knowing what to do with himself, he gets involved in everything: stealing someone else’s bride, beating trolls at cards, etc.

The more adventures he has, the further he is from Ibsen’s drama and the harder it is to delve into the plot. Per's youthful rebellion is filled with impeccable sincerity, but the text greatly hinders him. Probably sensing this, Zakharov forces the heroes to switch to Norwegian in the most pathetic places.

With a mountain accent

In the second act, having finally dealt with the original source, the director turns the Button Man into Mephistopheles, who helps Faust, that is, Peru, to experience passion in the arms of the daughter of the mountain king (Anitra speaks with a mountain accent, and people with machine guns walk around). Then Mephistopheles arranges an escape from the psychiatric hospital, where either the head physician or the eastern despot explains to Peru that it is possible to rebel on our side, but only in fenced-off places, and there - “at least you’ll be torn to the rectum...”.

As it should be in a cheerful, low genre, this very gut is mentioned often in the play, so that the audience laughs and applauds almost all the time, as has been the custom for thirty years at Lenkom performances.

Towards the end, Peer Gynt, still just as young, but a little less springy, notices that he must be already approaching fifty, then even more, then even more. When the inexorable Button Man finally drags him to be melted down, he breaks out to visit the hut of his beloved Solveig. And here a royal gift awaits the viewer. In Ibsen, Per is met by an old woman who has waited for him all his life and is blinded by grief. But the heroes of the musical do not know old age, so Anton Shagin is met by young Anastasia Marchuk in a white dress.

The plot does not suffer from this, the viewer stops delving into it at the beginning of the second act, and the picture turns out to be very beautiful and with a very pleasant moral: it turns out that you can waste your life ineptly, go out and smoke, and then return to your beloved girl and start all over again . A real balm for our tormented souls, it’s no wonder that the audience squeals with delight. At Lenkom - success again.

RG, March 28, 2011

Irina Korneeva

In the kingdom of the trolls

Mark Zakharov staged "Peer Gynt" at Lenkom

First measures new production Mark Zakharov's "Peer Gynt" would be the envy of Emir Kusturica.

With such infectious cheerfulness, promising drive and endless pressure, Lenkom's Peer Gynt - Anton Shagin - gets excited about his exploits among people and antics in the company evil spirits. And with such energy and determination, Mark Zakharov takes on the reworking of one of the most famous examples of Scandinavian literature. Known also for their difficult stage presence.

"...And, overcome with confusion, we rush through the fogs, cut through flocks of birds - and seagulls shy away. There is no way to restrain the flight. Suddenly something flashed below - an animal was swimming with its belly up. This reflection of us in the lake began to move: soaring , they were rushing straight towards us, because we were in the midst of a fall,” and so on and so forth in the text, which often (among other reasons) restrained the imagination and changed creative plans many directors since the spring of 1866, when Ibsen wrote the poem, but this was in no way an obstacle for Mark Zakharov.

In his performance, everything moves, develops, dances, sings and plays not only horizontally, but also vertically - the usual trajectories of people’s movements are clearly not enough here. Then Ose, the mother of Peer Gynt (Alexandra Zakharova), finds herself literally between heaven and earth, torn between the past and the future - and how else can you feel yourself in time and space, having such a restless son? Then the trolls, led by their forest king Viktor Rakov, begin to demonstrate the wonders of not only acting, but also circus art. Then Peer Gynt himself - Anton Shagin emerges into some new physiological dimension on stage, from a young creature splashing with strength and ideas at the beginning of the story, by the end transforming into a very old man, barely dragging his feet, without a shadow of brilliance and a drop of life in his eyes.

If you believe in the sincerity of Henrik Ibsen’s letters, then he created “Peer Gynt” exclusively for internal national use. An epistolary certificate has been preserved in which the classic of Norwegian literature admits to the translator that of all his works he believes that “Peer Gynt can least of all be understood outside the Scandinavian countries.” But just as the folklore image from the fairy tales of a successful hunter who deals with trolls and loves to boast about his merits, in Ibsen’s work turns into a specific person of the 19th century with his own earthly problems and fabulous possibilities, so in Mark Zakharov’s work Ibsen’s character is actually transformed into our contemporary. Passed through deserts (consider human callousness and indifference), and through insane asylums, seemingly Cairo, but for some reason surprisingly reminiscent of Soviet correctional dissident medical institutions. Prone to adventure, confused in goals and lost in meaning, as if in the wilderness... “Peer Gynt” for Mark Zakharov becomes only an excuse for a frank narrative, which can be told on behalf of literally everyone who has ever wondered why he lives, what is his purpose, and what can he consider the main result of his earthly existence? And the choreographer of the play Oleg Glushkov helps the director in this, who plastically leveled all the differences between the Scandinavian and Russian consciousness and gave extraordinary entertainment to this essentially confessional story.

“I began my directorial journey when the “common man” was highly valued and glorified. It seems that now almost all of us, along with Dostoevsky, Platonov, Bulgakov and other visionaries, have realized the truth or have come closer to it - there are very difficult people around us, even if they pretend to be cogs ", - Mark Zakharov explained his choice in the program. - I am interested in Peer Gynt, perhaps because I passed the “point of no return” and really felt that life is not endless, as it seemed to me in childhood and even after graduating from theater institute. Now you can look at your own life like a chessboard and understand what squares my path went through, what I avoided and what I got into, sometimes regretting what happened later. The main thing is to start correctly, and the most important thing is to understand where it is, your Beginning How to guess your only possible path through the labyrinths of life circumstances and your own beliefs, if you have them... And if not? Find! Reveal from the depths of the subconscious... But sometimes what has already been found leaves the soul, turning into a mirage, and then a new, painful search awaits in the chaos of events, hopes, smoldering memories and belated prayers."

Judging by the auction that took place on the Internet on the eve of the first showings of the play for the right (speculative - how can one fight this!) to have tickets to the Lenkom premiere, Mark Zakharov again very accurately guessed the dominant mood of the time, the paramount social overarching goals and the vital artistic therapeutic statements. Even if dressed in dram clothes for a long time days gone by. But it wasn’t for the sake of Ibsen’s poem that the first viewers were ready to give money, for which they could easily fly to the author’s homeland to admire the Norwegian fjords with their own eyes and personally negotiate with the trolls about their well-being for at least the next ten years. “Lenkom” now has its own fairy-tale landscapes and its favorite characters from the days of “The Ordinary Miracle” rule the roost. But if the heroes who, like Peer Gynt, dream of changing the world, do not become fewer over the centuries, then real problems begin with miracles with age. And at the Mark Zakharov Theater they fill this deficit. At least faith in miracles, and not only at premieres, is guaranteed to be returned there.

VM, March 30, 2011

Olga Fuks

To be alive and only

“Peer Gynt” by Mark Zakharov at Lenkom

Trolls, kobolds, goblins, monkeys, Bedouins, Norwegian peasants and big world businessmen, eastern thieves and eastern houris... Norwegian fjords and the Sahara desert, a madhouse in Cairo and the depths of the sea...

The abundance of themes and plots that arise in the fate of Peer Gynt, the prodigal son of Norway (or, for that matter, the whole world), not without reason cooled the ardor of the directors. Few decided to embark on this theatrical journey following Peer Gynt, and more often these were literary and musical compositions, fortunately Ibsen’s compatriot Edvard Grieg left the world a legacy of a brilliant suite.

Mark Zakharov made up his mind. There were only one or two exact correspondences to the play in his performance. Inspirational gags - in bulk. Starting from the “letter” and then from the “spirit” of the literary monument, the director soon became completely carried away by the most important thing - the formulation of his own anxious feelings and constantly elusive truths. The artist Alexey Kondratyev (a student of Oleg Sheintsis created a wonderful multifunctional transforming cube, achieving both a fabulous atmosphere and European style) and choreographer Oleg Glushkov, who imbued the action with movement and drive, helped him endlessly in this.

Zakharovsky's Peer Gynt is an eternal boy who will never grow old or acquire a solid business based on his blood. Anton Shagin - the indecently young Lopakhin from The Cherry Orchard, who seemed like a bitter and mocking farewell just in case - bursts onto the stage like a fresh wind, making one remember both Til-Karachentsov and Joaquin-Abdulov.

Hangs from under the grate, twists like a loach into crazy somersaults, gets involved in obviously losing fights of one against all, shoots fish in the theatrical skies - in a word, brings to life that unique taste of adventure, audacity and romance, without which it would be unbearably insipid. And only the path - the only earthly path to the grave, the clear path of his destiny - he still cannot find. His eternal questions “Who am I?” and “I just need to figure out where to start?” - do not reveal laziness of the soul, but the fear of missing the ideal.

Too often looking at the sky, he passes by earthly happiness. “To be alive and only, alive and only - to the end” - this is the main achievement that Zakharov’s Peer Gynt can boast of, who returned to his native shores not old, but mortally tired of the life he had lived. One of Ibsen’s most mysterious characters, the master Buttonmaker (Sergei Stepanchenko), was never able to melt the soul of Peer Gynt into a flawlessly shiny button: the ideal homo sapiens. The horror of modeling an ideal person and citizen - and essentially a robot - spilled out in the scene madhouse in Cairo, where patients are prescribed a “massage of the tormented soul”, turning them into humanoid blanks.

Alexandra Zakharova again becomes Shagin’s partner – this time in the role of Oze’s mother. The notorious transition from “heroine” to “age” role was easy for her. Her Oze is a black-haired beast, about whom I don’t really want to say “single mother,” although the drunkard captain Jon Gynt is not even remembered here, and the revival former glory Pera is not at all interested in his father's family. Her maternal care for her son is heavily implicated in female longing for the male ideal.

Three heroines - three female images- will enter the life of Peer Gynt. Anitra (Alexandra Vinogradova) will entice you with unearthly pleasures, giving devastation as a reward. Ingrid (Svetlana Ilyukhina) will reveal to him the bitterness and eternal seal of his own sin (Zakharov combined in one person a stolen bride and a dishonored troll princess who gave birth to a freak son from Peer Gynt).

Solveig (Alla Yuganova), who has been waiting for him all his life, will turn out to be an ideal that he does not dare to touch, and the main justification of Peer Gynt on earth. Paraphrasing Protagore’s “Man is the measure of all things,” Zakharov innocently and sentimentally proves: love is the measure of all things.

Novaya Gazeta, March 29, 2011

Marina Tokareva

Intercession of love

Mark Zakharov admitted: there is nothing more important

At Lenkom - premiere: "Peer Gynt". An energetic young performance that leaves conflicting feelings.

Mark Zakharov once said: you need to stage material that contains yourself. “Peer Gynt” is a personal statement, a confession. Albeit disguised by the roar of music, the whirlwind of acrobatic somersaults, the choreographic vivacity of Lenkomov’s young artists and the power of scenography (artist Alexey Kondratyev).

In the preface program for the performance, Zakharov writes that, turning around, he looks at his life like a chessboard, trying to understand which squares he walked through and whether this path was the only possible one. The epigraph to this performance is an almost hidden phrase: “...sometimes what has already been found leaves the soul, turning into a mirage, and then a new painful search awaits in the chaos of events, hopes, smoldering memories and belated prayers.”

This year Zakharov will turn seventy-eight. This maestro with a crying face, imperturbable humor and a diamond will, who always knew how to mix mockery and compassion, light cynicism and high feelings, is looking for himself anew in the difficult circumstances of the life of the theater and society. And chooses Peer Gynt as his guiding star, eternal wanderer in search of your purpose. Who is he really: a waster of life and a creator of chimeras or a tireless pursuer of truth? Zakharov is looking for his own answer.

Ibsen is a colossal figure for his time. Thinker and playwright, whose fame and plays crossed the borders of Europe. Today, almost no one remembers that it was he who wrote the canonical maxims: “Don’t live by lies” and “Man, be who you are.” In Russia at the turn of the century he was received stormily and jealously. Leo Tolstoy believed that all characters were “fictitious, false... all characters are not true.” Chekhov was sure that “Ibsen does not know life.” But he rose as a dark sun over the poets Silver Age- from Annensky to Khodasevich, from Blok to Andrei Bely. Why? Because all of them, and especially the symbolists, were absorbed in the question of how to combine life and creativity, how to obtain a new “philosopher’s stone” of self-realization. For Nikolai Berdyaev, Peer Gynt is the Norwegian Faust. And in the Soviet tradition, it was customary to brand Ibsen’s hero as an egoist, a lazy person, the embodiment of an “average” person. Ibsen himself called his play rich fairy tale motifs, “the most Norwegian” of all created. Famous music Edvard Grieg surrounded Peer Gynt with a magical substance, in which Berdyaev’s words sparkled in a new way: “Ibsen lived and worked under the power of the attraction of mountain heights and infinity”...

Anton Shagin received main role during. His Peer Gynt is a liar, a bully, a dreamer. In the first act, he is a ball of energy, ball lightning, striking either his mother (he puts her on the roof so as not to interfere), then Ingrid (he drags her away from the wedding into the forest to be the first), then Solveig (she is the only one capable of resisting him). Neither a crowd of men with daggers, nor an ominous flock of trolls can surround him and destroy him - he is faster and smarter. So he beats the King of the Trolls, Davorsky's grandfather, at cards (Viktor Rakov noticeably bathes in the comic nuances of the role) - and gets his freedom. Together with the beautiful golden-haired Solveig (Alla Yuganova) becomes an outcast... But happiness for two is not enough for the yearning soul. In the frantic eyes of Shagin - Peer Gynt - a mixture of Russian inexplicable anxiety and causeless Ibsenian melancholy; anxiety drives him into the distance, to where his “destination” lies. Insolence and stupidity spin the dashing head. Shagin brings down on the audience a temperament akin to the elements, demonstrates vortex plasticity, vortex transitions of states, the hero’s youth is given to him better than maturity. The most difficult thing is Peer Gynt's metamorphosis, his path to the finale.

The other center of the play is Pugovichnik (Sergei Stepanchenko). The down-to-earth, rustic Mephistopheles, whose the main task melt down the hero, turn him into a tin statue, with an everyday grumbling intonation cools Peer Gynt’s ardor, groaning, rescues him from troubles, casually drops it to him, inflamed by amorous visions: “... but Solveig, unfortunately, is alone...”

Ose, Peer Gynt's mother, - Alexandra Zakharova. Freed from the clutches of the “heroine,” the actress enthusiastically inhabits the grotesque image of an eccentric mother, ready every minute to flare up either with admiration for her offspring, or with indignation, whose severity turns into pity, tender regret.

Zakharov has been afraid all his life of being too serious, afraid that the audience will get bored. Therefore, he cut the text by more than half and introduced an equal choreographic “element”; The crowd, trained by choreographer Oleg Glushkov, here signifies everything: the inertia of the peasants, the savagery of the Scandinavian forest evil spirits, the criminal intrigues of the Bedouins, and the silent dissidents sent to humility in the dungeon. Good, energetic, but excessive. And closer to the end it already looks like insert numbers.

In the second act, where the hero goes through the temptations of the flesh to curb the freedom of the mind, something should happen that sums up the circle of Peer Gynt's tossing. A viewer who knows nothing about Ibsen may decide: well, the man has had his fill, it’s time and honor to know if he wants some homemade cabbage soup. There is a noticeable lack of Ibsen's dramatic fabric, Ibsen's text. But there is another one, with direct references to today (the author of the stage version is Zakharov himself).

And yet the director, not without bitterness looking at changes in circumstances, place and time, on the stage, where he was fully realized, has the strength to remain a wise storyteller.

...The button maker brings the hero into his declining years. Life has passed, and Peer Gynt keeps repeating: who am I? Neither this nor that! The button maker is inexorable: perhaps into the crucible, time is up.

But Peer Gynt begs for a reprieve. He needs to return to Solveig and ask for forgiveness. “She won’t see you,” throws Button Man, “she’s blind.” Trembling, hesitant, the hero approaches the woman of his life, young and beautiful, not a hair's breadth - this is how Zakharov solves the scene - not changed. And she lights up with happiness, feeling his face: “He’s back!” In Solveig, Peer Gynt, who forever remained her lover, finds his “destination.”

As it was said in the old translation of the play: “And for whom love itself / Intercession does not get cold, / He will be a family of angels / Welcomed in heaven”...

And the Button Man retreats.

New news, March 29, 2011

Olga Egoshina

And instead of a heart there is an atomic reactor

Mark Zakharov has brought out a new hero of our days

“Peer Gynt” at Lenkom took a long time to prepare: a new translation of Ibsen’s huge play-poem was commissioned. Mark Zakhrov made choreographer Oleg Glushkov co-author of the performance. The story of the prodigal son, wanderer, braggart and rebel was played, danced and sung on the Lenkom stage. And the title role was played by the young premier of the troupe, Anton Shagin, who is rapidly gaining popularity.

“Peer Gynt” stands somewhat apart in the diverse work of Henrik Ibsen. A monstrous hybrid (the five acts of this huge text forced even Nemirovich-Danchenko to make cuts and abbreviations), this “dramatic poem” in some places seems like an outright parody of the author’s own work, in others – a social pamphlet, in others – a confession. Not intending this text for the theater, Henrik Ibsen, when he finally decided to give it stage life, first turned to his compatriot composer Edvard Grieg, who wrote his main and best composition for the musical accompaniment of Peer Gynt. And this given “musical-dramatic” nature of the play (it’s interesting to think about Ibsen not only as an author new drama, but also as a younger contemporary of Jacques Offenbach) was also an obstacle for many directors who did not find in Peer Gynt the author of Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House or Ghosts.

Mark Zakharov, who had not previously addressed Ibsen, found this multi-part text close and interesting (“maybe because I passed the “point of no return” and really felt that life is not endless, as it seemed to me in childhood”). Together with Oleg Glushkov, stopping some lines and coloring others, Zakharov composed his own fantasy performance on Ibsen's themes and variations.

On the right side of the theater's proscenium was the orchestra, which set the tempo and rhythm of the production from the first minute. The young actors of “Lenkom”, easily changing the costumes of their village neighbors for cast-offs of trolls, the oriental robes of Bedouins for the uniform of the inhabitants of a madhouse, dance and sing temperamentally, performing various acrobatic stunts along the way and bringing into the production that same “not too serious spirit” that is in the director’s In the preface to the program, Mark Zakharov called it a distinctive feature of his theater.

The charming extras in Peer Gynt became an advantageous backdrop for the main characters, and above all Peer Gynt himself, played by Anton Shagin.

A recent graduate of the Moscow Art Theater School, Anton Shagin, within a few years, became a noticeable phenomenon in the capital’s scene and our cinema. In parallel with the premiere at Lenkom, Alexander Mindadze’s film “On Saturday” was released on the capital’s screens, and was a success at the 61st Berlin Film Festival. Anton Shagin plays the main role of the party instructor and former rock musician Valera (aka Johnny), who witnessed the night explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Roles rehearsed nearby often influence each other. And Shagin brought into his Peer Gynt the strontium poison of Mindadze’s eschatological film. His Per lives in a world where a reactor has already caught fire, and that’s why crazy energy tears his good body apart, carries him away from home, from his mother Oze (Alexandra Zakharova), from his beloved Solveig (Alla Yuganova). His fearlessness, which Per is rightly proud of as main value, grows out of knowledge of one’s own doom and the doom of the world.

For many, the anticipation of the end gives rise to panic or passivity. Mark Zakharov was always interested in rare specimens, to which this knowledge added rage and courage. In the play, Per literally flies through complex structures built by set designer Alexey Kondratyev, and dances as if in battle. And it opposes the philosophically dispassionate Button Man (the subtle, charming and intelligent work of Sergei Stepanchenko) not so much on the verbal level, but by the very fact of its existence. “A lonely heart and a body of countless beds,” this Per loves the world and life in his special way of a strongman and a daredevil, ready to invest all of himself in any undertaking.

To justify this Per, no Solveig with her sacrificial love is needed (Zakharov remained faithful to the ending of the original source: Per returns to Solveig and Button Man postpones sending him to the hellish smelter). Not the heart loving woman, and the strange flying soul pushing Per forward and forward is the main achievement and the main plot of his life, which, although it did not bear fruit, managed to become a legend.

Izvestia, April 4, 2011

Marina Davydova

Dancing about the main Peer Gynt

Mark Zakharov recognized himself in Ibsen's hero

Unexpectedly for everyone, the artistic director of Lenkom turned to Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, giving the title role to the young premier of the troupe, Anton Shagin.

The play about the Norwegian folklore character turned out to be, in a sense, a play about the director himself.

Ask a modern viewer what Ibsen’s famous work was written about, he will probably be confused. “Peer Gynt” for him, although a beautiful sound, is empty. Well, at best, he’ll sing “Solveig’s Song.” Grieg, by the way, reacted to his compatriot's play without much enthusiasm and composed music for it, as they say, under pressure, but, however, even under pressure sometimes it turns out well and even brilliantly.

However, I have a suspicion that not only the audience, but also most of the directors, including Mark Zakharov, have a vague idea about the true meanings and subtexts of Peer Gynt. It still comes to mind to consider the work of the Norwegian playwright in the context of the Nietzschean cult of the superman, but almost never in the context of the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Meanwhile, it is unlikely that all of Ibsen’s plays could serve as a kind of dramatic illustration to the works of the forerunner of European existentialism.

All of them are about how, in the fight against the rules prevailing in society, a person tries to rise above the crowd and discover his true destiny. All of Ibsen’s heroes are rebels, going against the grain, not only political (“Enemy of the People”), but also family (Nora abandons as many as three children to find herself), and even ordinary people. In the play Brand, written shortly before Peer Gynt, the priest selflessly leads people to shining heights, not particularly caring that they die like flies along the way. Either in the process of life you acquire your selfhood (“existence”), or you are doomed to drag out an “inauthentic” existence.

So, if you evaluate the heroes according to Ibsen’s peculiar scale, it turns out that Peer Gynt is perhaps the only unconditionally negative protagonist of his plays. A dramatic poem, the action of which spans half a century and takes place in different parts of the globe - from the magical land of trolls to the Sahara Desert - tells how folk hero(in Ibsen’s interpretation, a remarkable person from birth) does NOT find himself. With village boys he is a country boy (albeit a Skoda), with trolls he is a troll, with financiers he is a financier, in Norway he is Norwegian, in Morocco he is Moroccan. He was never able to “be himself” - these words are repeated in the play as a haunting refrain. He is subject to refining, because he has not been able to become either this or that, even a full-fledged sinner.

It would be logical to assume that Mark Zakharov, having heard this leitmotif of the play, will stage a play about the true hero of our time - a man without qualities, about the death of the individual in a post-industrial society, about his transformation into a set social functions(a most pressing topic, I must say). Nothing happened... The premiere of "Lenkom" is devoid of any relevance and any signs of political satire, although it is from "Peer Gynt", in which everything in the world is ridiculed - from the wild East to the pragmatic West, - it was easy to make.

The cumbersome and populous drama was considerably shortened by Zakharov and turned into an energetic, dynamic, full of songs, dances, jokes, jokes, in general, all the Lenkom stylistic features of the show. In a conventional set (Alexey Kondratyev tried to pretend to be Oleg Sheintsis here, without much success), in conventional costumes (they sometimes really smack of a provincial Youth Theater), the Lenkom artists happily jump around the stage, and the live orchestra sitting on the right cheerfully accompanies them.

Viktor Rakov in the role of the king of the trolls is a little comical, Sergei Stepanchenko in the role of Button Man, who strives to melt down Peer Gynt, succumbs to Lenkomov’s signature irony, Alexandra Zakharova (Peer Gynt’s mother - Ose) demonstrates antics that the audience remembers from the time of the film “Formula of Love”, but since then somewhat dilapidated. The first act of the performance, in essence, can be reviewed in one phrase: it’s not clear what it’s about, but they dance well. But in the second act, the director’s plan timidly begins to emerge from under Lenkomov’s signature tricks.

And it becomes clear that Peer Gynt for Zakharov is not a typical hero whom he wants to expose, but rather the alter ego of a director who has gone through most earthly path and suddenly thought about the value of the vanity (about the cheerful young revelry, dissident inclinations, exotic impressions) with which this path was lined. The main character in the play "Lenkom" is played by Anton Shagin, and he plays not just well, but somehow selflessly.

After Evgeniy Mironov, perhaps, there has not appeared on our stage an artist who has such a technique as Shagin’s, and has such control over his psychophysical apparatus. But if in the first part of the performance the dizzying somersaults he performs seem, albeit spectacular, but like trickery, then in the second part he finally manages to achieve that intonation of absolute despair, which, as one might guess, was important for the director.

The artistic director of Lenkom was clearly going to stage a serious play about the tortuous life path which leads to nowhere. And all the rides, songs and dances and other stage chaos were piled on the stage out of habit. The mess is pleasing, but not very impressive. But for me personally, several confessional notes of the performance are an unconditional justification for this latest invigorating and entertaining Lenkom performance. In it, Mark Zakharov, as the great Ibsen bequeathed, tried, at least for a while, to stop being the head of a successful theater and become himself - a little tired of life and, like most of us, a person who had not solved its secrets.

MN, April 4, 2011

Dina Goder

About myself

Mark Zakharov staged Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt" at Lenkom

It is best to go to a performance in Lenkom without reading Peer Gynt. That same gigantic Ibsen play that never succeeded in productions, but always excited minds. The hero of which, the peasant Per, who lived in these two hundred pages full of adventure life from youth to old age, it seemed to interpreters romantic poet, sometimes a successful scoundrel, sometimes a winner in the Nietzschean spirit. If you haven’t read Ibsen, then you won’t have to constantly involuntarily accuse the “stage version”, written by Mark Zakharov based on “Peer Gynt,” of inconsistency with the original and get lost in what jungle the director’s imagination has led him. And she took him far - from rural Norway to the headquarters of today's warring Muslims, where women in black burqas brandish Kalashnikov assault rifles.

The way in which those scenes and those roles from the play that were useful to the director were melted into the play causes confusion. Oze, Per's devoted mother, played by Alexandra Zakharova in a scorching gypsy black wig, looks like a broken comic woman, such as this actress has played more than once. Alla Yuganova presented the classic golden-haired Solveig as a mannered, pretty fool who directly says: “Dad, I don’t need intelligence.” The silly king of the trolls, played by Viktor Rakov with his crown askew, is immediately similar to all the comic kings from Soviet plays - from Schwartz to Gorin. Wriggling in the supposed oriental dance Arab seductress Anitra (Alexandra Vinogradova) speaks with such a market Caucasian accent that it becomes awkward. The insane asylum where Per is taken by men dressed in black with machine guns looks like an Arab mercenary training camp, where indifferent patients in identical black caps and T-shirts look drugged, and the doctor (Ivan Agapov) in a European suit mutters menacingly: “We’ve been behind you for a long time.” watched."

It’s sad to watch, although the audience, which loves Lenkom artists, often laughs. It's sad not because the script itself and its production are full common places, that the story looks ragged and it is often not at all clear what is happening on stage. And because in this performance Zakharov with all his paradoxes, jokes and words is very recognizable. And when the insinuating devil Pugovichnik (Sergei Stepanchenko), who dreams of melting Per’s soul into a button, says that he was “traumatized by the meeting with his homeland and people,” or when the doctor promises: “We will deliver your suffering soul from liberal delusions,” - all this is familiar. But what had previously been witty vignettes on the margins of other people’s plays was forced to become content in Zakharov’s own play, and it turned out that you couldn’t put together a whole story from these details. They slip through your fingers like sand.

The best thing about this production is Anton Shagin, who plays the title role, although he is only good for minutes, since the actor has neither material nor clear tasks for a large, integral role. Shagin, who immediately after graduating from the institute became famous for his central - straightforward and naive - role in the dashing "Hipsters", and now has revealed his true scale and depth in the role of a gloomy party worker from the film "On Saturday", plays in "Peer Gynt" a somewhat complicated version of the dude Mels . Young, sincere and hot Per, perhaps, sometimes flirts (for example, when he steals a bride he doesn’t need at all from someone else’s wedding, and then abandons her), but, in essence, until the very end he remains the same pure boy-dreamer, dressed in today's leather jacket and jeans, old age never comes to the hero. Formally, what Peer Gynt has in common with Mels is the fact that he dances famously - Zakharov builds his performance on the principle of “drama with dancing” (and dancing takes up so much space that choreographer Oleg Glushkov, who also worked in Hipsters, is listed as a co-director at Lenkom) . But mainly, Per is similar to Mels in that he is furiously energetic and unstoppably rushes towards his goal. It’s just that neither we nor the hero himself know what this goal is in Peer Gynt.

When rewriting the play for his production, the director pulled out only one theme from Ibsen’s text - the hero’s search for himself, his destiny. Per talks about this constantly, not letting us forget what the game is for, but Zakharov himself said it best in his lyrical preface to the play: “I’m interested in Peer Gynt, maybe because I’ve passed the “point of no return” and really I felt that life is not endless, as it seemed to me in childhood and even after graduating from theater institute. Now you can look at your own life, like at a chessboard, and understand which squares my path took, what I avoided and what I got into, sometimes regretting what happened later. The main thing is to start correctly, and most importantly, to understand where it is, your beginning. How to guess your only possible path through the labyrinths of life circumstances and your own beliefs, if you have them... And if not? Find!"

It is clear that Lenkom's Peer Gynt is Zakharov's lyrical hero, his alter ego, he is the way the director, having passed the “point of no return” and looking back, sees himself. Or I would like to see myself. In this sense, of course, it is symptomatic that one of the most significant tests of Per in Ibsen’s drama - the Great Curve enveloping him in darkness, which he cannot overcome on his own - was never included in Zakharov’s script.

Radio Liberty, April 4, 2011

Marina Timasheva

"Peer Gynt": the return of the Hero

Premiere at the Lenkom Theater. The play based on Henrik Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt" was staged by Mark Zakharov.

The plot of the five-act dramatic poem by the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is mythological and fairy-tale. Peer Gynt is a braggart and a talker, hides from his fellow villagers who are angry with him in the forest, ends up in the kingdom of the trolls, marries the daughter of their King, then flees from them and returns to the one he loves, the beautiful Solveig.

The trolls are chasing him, so he hits the road again, becomes a speculator and slave trader, ends up in Cairo, where he ends up in a madhouse. Having got out of it, he returns to his homeland and meets Button Man on the way. The mystical character tells Peer Gynt that he has not lived up to his destiny, which means his soul will be melted down. In the finale, the Button Man abandons Peer Gynt for the sake of Solveig, her faith in her chosen one and her love for him.

The stage directions for the play say: “The action lasts from the beginning of the 19th century to the sixties and takes place partly in the Gudbrand Valley and nearby mountains, partly on the Moroccan coast, partly in the Sahara Desert, in a madhouse in Cairo, at the sea.”

This is exactly how it happens in the play. On the stage there is only one hut with a luminous window, but it is a folding hut, in other words, a transformer - it can turn into all sorts of other structures, and the moving beams become either tree trunks, or mill blades, or acrobatic projectiles along which trolls deftly move - whatever they become (scenography by Alexey Kondratiev). But the action, of course, takes place not only in Norway or Egypt, it takes place in the universe.

The play has been translated again, greatly shortened and re-edited. The Button Man appears at the very beginning of the play, the troll's daughter and the evil old woman turn out to be Ingrid - the girl who was seduced and betrayed by Peer Gynt, and she swore to take revenge on him (all three roles are played by Alla Yuganova). Having shortened Ibsen, Lenkom lightly added topical texts to it. Grigory Gorin is not with us, and there is no one else to do such brilliant stagings, but the texts written by the theater do not cause rejection. For example, the scene in the madhouse is satirical. It’s just that in Ibsen’s time it referred to the events that were then taking place in Norway. And in Lenkom - to those that are now happening in Russia.

The music for Ibsen's dramatic poem was written by Grieg, but in the performance only the most famous melody remained from Grieg - Solveig's song. The new musical accompaniment was composed by Sergei Rudnitsky and performed by a live orchestra. The composer made elegant stylizations of oriental ornamental motifs and Scandinavian folk melodies.

The work of the wonderful choreographer Oleg Glushkov deserves the highest praise. The artists dance as if they had worked in Broadway musicals for a year or two, while every gesture, every movement carries a significant dramatic load.

Thanks to large bills, modern music and plastic, the performance is much more laconic, energetic and rhythmic than the play itself. This makes it easier to perceive, but does not remove the essential meanings laid down by Henrik Ibsen: about the meaning of life, about how a person can remain himself, and how to understand what he really is. The main difference between a person and trolls is explained to Peer Gynt by their King (in Viktor Rakov, he is rather stupid and drunk): “to be yourself or to be satisfied with yourself.” And Pugovichnik (a seemingly good-natured comedian, Sergei Stepanchenko) explains what it means to be yourself: “you always express only what the Almighty wanted you to express.” Pride, the desire to become first among equals, and a “self-confident soul” did not allow Peer Gynt to fulfill his destiny; he thoughtlessly and in vain spent the time allotted by God. Here Mark Zakharov has no differences in interpretation with Ibsen.

Another thing is the image of Peer Gynt himself. You can treat it differently. If you believe Ibsen’s own statement (“The soul of a man lies in his deeds”), then those who see in Peer Gynt an insignificant, arrogant opportunist who always acts as circumstances dictate to him are right. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a different point of view triumphed: Peer Gynt was a dreamer and poet, rushing around the world in search of perfection.

Mark Zakharov offers his own interpretation of the character, which is grandly embodied on stage by Anton Shagin. Shagin plays the way his hero lives: to the limit of physical and mental capabilities, to the utmost, and does not spare himself. In Shagin's Peer Gynt there is so much stray strength that there is nothing to apply it to, so much passion that it cannot be spent, such a wild thirst for life that life itself cannot quench it. Shagin plays the Russian Peer Gynt, very similar to Vanyusha from Alexander Bashlachev’s ballad: “The soul walks, the body carries itself.”

Self-destruction is a very typical way out of this situation. And love is the only opportunity to resist death, that light that flickered in the window of a village hut, that woman who had been waiting for him for so many years. In Ibsen, Peer Gynt is saved by Solveig's love; in Zakharov, his love for Solveig is saving.

After the new performance of "Lenkom", I remember the young Nikolai Karachentsov in "Tila" and "Juno", and there is no escape from associations with Baron Munchausen: Peer Gynt tells stories about deer hunting or fires from a gun, and shot fish fall from the sky. But Til, Count Rezanov, and Munchausen come from another time, the embodiment of an absolute ethical norm.

In Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" one can see a prototype of Chekhov's "man who wanted", one can see a Nietzschean superman. And in Zakharov, Peer Gynt went through temptations, through suffering, but remained himself, or rather, returned to himself. And with him on Russian scene The Hero returns.

Kommersant, April 5, 2011

Rewritten from Norwegian

"Peer Gynt" in "Lenkom"

The Moscow Lenkom Theater presented the premiere of a play based on Henrik Ibsen's dramatic poem "Peer Gynt". For this production, the theater's artistic director Mark Zakharov invited young choreographer Oleg Glushkov as a co-author. Narrated by ROMAN DOLZHANSKY.

Before appreciating the efforts of Mark Zakharov and Oleg Glushkov, the public sees the work of artist Alexei Kondratiev - a huge black square with a pearlescent window in the center of it. Or is it not a window, but that same beautiful big button into which the Button Man proposes to melt the soul title character plays and performances. At the beginning, however, the public knows nothing about the importance of the button in the complex system of symbols of the play “Peer Gynt”: Ibsen’s great dramatic poem is such a rare guest on the Russian stage that only a few remember about it. If it were not for the music of Edvard Grieg, one could write: only theater experts and well-read directors.

And we actually don’t know anything about Kondratieff’s set design. Although we should guess that the matter will not be limited to just a square against the backdrop of a rocky wall, otherwise “Lenkom” would not be itself. That’s right: the square turns out to be a cleverly designed transformer, it not only opens and unfolds, easily turning into a simple village house, an elegant oriental tent or a gloomy Egyptian prison, it not only rotates around its axis, but, being fixed on a long podium-arrow , moves into the depths of the stage to give way to black, as if charred, trees falling from the grate with a crash. Light and sound effects are included, and everyone is free in their associations. The house on the edge of the stage ledge really reminded me of Norway, of Grieg’s estate hanging lonely over the sea, probably because “Solveig’s Song” serves as the leitmotif of the Lenkom performance, accompanied by live music.

Probably, the complex stage mechanism is even more important for the authors of the play. They talk about life as a strange and unknowable “mechanism” in which it is very difficult for a person to find a place for himself as an appropriate gear. "Peer Gynt" is a folklore and philosophical story about a village boy, a talented rebel, adventurer and loner who challenges life in the hope of discovering the meaning of his own personality. On modern language Peer Gynt's problem is called the "problem of personal identity", half of his works are devoted to it contemporary art, and Ibsen in this sense may well be considered one of the fathers of not only the “new drama”, but also modern art. Mark Zakharov outlines a theme rather than develops it; after all, he is producing a product for a large audience, and before even hinting at something important, it needs to be amused, surprised and entertained.

The first act of the Lenkom production is more like a concert, which Oleg Glushkov had to work hard on: the characters start dancing every now and then, the action, as if some special drug was injected into the stage, rushes at a frantic pace, the episodes sweep away each other, everything spins and glows, and even those who not only dance, but also speak, manage to “shout out” their characters rather than play them.

It is only possible to get a good look at the main character, played by the young actor Anton Shagin, in the second act. Or rather, a couple of main characters: it is unnecessary to remind that Mark Zakharov produces not so much plays as the author’s fantasies on the themes of the plays. For the director, dialogue with the audience is more important than dialogue with the author. Not even half of Ibsen's text remained in the Lenkom production, and even the remainder was radically reworked. That same Button Man appears in Ibsen at the very end of the play, right before Peer Gynt has to meet Solveig, who has been waiting for him all his life, blind, but who appears as his last consolation.

In Mark Zakharov's work, the Button Man, performed by Sergei Stepanchenko, becomes Peer Gynt's companion, his tempter and his judge, his savior and his executioner. They look interesting together - the impetuous, delicate, restless Peer Gynt and the stocky, experienced, food-loving skeptic Button Man, who knows the value of everything in the world. And if you believe Berdyaev, quoted in the program, that Ibsen’s poem should be compared with Goethe’s Faust, then the Button Man is, of course, Mephistopheles. It is he who literally drags Peer Gynt out of his home and forces him to kidnap someone else’s bride. Later, somewhere in the East, he throws a young man into a world of sophisticated bodily pleasures, but then the same omnipresent Button Man rescues the hero Shagin from prison, where a jailer with the appearance and habits of a KGB officer explains to Peer Gynt how to behave.

Anton Shagin, apparently, is destined for the fate of the new leader of the Lenkom troupe. For this, the young actor seems to have all the data - charm, temperament, the ability to make the most effective use of stage time and space. Judging by some episodes of the performance, he is also capable of the art of external transformation. But this time it was not really useful: Mark Zakharov decided to please the audience and not make the characters grow old - meeting many decades after separation, Peer Gynt and Solveig in the play "Lenkom" remain young.

The New Times, April 4, 2011

Ksenia Larina

New hero of Lenkom

In "Peer Gynt" Mark Zakharov stopped the moment

Remelting. Each iconic work of Lenkom is melted into stage plot part of the history of the theater itself. The phantasmagoria “Peer Gynt” rhymes with the legendary Lenkom hits and with the biography of the most important director, who encrypted his entire destiny in the new performance.

Mark Zakharov, who carefully preserves the signature Lenkom style he once invented, has always staged performances about himself. Maybe that’s why most of his works are so durable, and “Juno and Avos” is still performed on the theater stage, approaching its thirtieth anniversary. At the center of Zakharov’s works there is always a lone hero challenging the world, a hero in whom time was concentrated, which made it possible to unmistakably divide the world into friends and foes. Based on these performances, one can create a cardiogram of the life of their author. The defeated romanticism of Zhadov-Mironov (“ Plum"at the Satire Theater) was replaced by fearlessness and some kind of bad crazy courage of Ulenspiegel-Karachentsov. Boyish stubbornness, melted into genuine heroism, is imprinted in the image of Lieutenant Pluzhnikov-Abdulov (“I wasn’t on the lists”), mental tossing and doubts about choosing one’s own path are in Chekhov’s Ivanov and Treplev. Dmitry Pevtsov's restless Figaro demonstrated adventurism and the eternal desire to change places, and Count Rezanov, who died of fever, became a symbol of service and devotion - to the fatherland, calling, woman. The current Peer Gynt contains the features of almost all the heroes who have ever set foot on the Lenkom stage, and, it seems, is about to sum up their collective life.

A thousand and one genres

I don’t know if Mark Zakharov started working on Ibsen’s drama with these thoughts, but he was unable to sum it up: “Peer Gynt” is simply indecently bursting with youth and health, which convincingly demonstrates the creative and intellectual capacity of the author and director. And despite the sad ending, which merely reminds us of the frailty of human life, the story of an extravagant boy who never turned into an old man turned out to be surprisingly optimistic and bright. It seems that at some point the creators pushed Ibsen’s grandfather aside, thanking him for the inspired, dizzying plot, and, like crazy trolls, dragged the play into their hole. Along this path, the director's fantasy turns it either into a terrible forest fairy tale about monsters and freaks, or into a rollicking village operetta, or into an airy pastoral, or into a surreal dystopia, or into “A Thousand and One Nights,” or into “Faust.” The musicians, huddled near the portal, are watching what is happening with such excitement and cheerful interest that it seems that they are choosing music along the way, like high-class tappers in cinemas. The music follows the plot and carries the plot, instantly switching from peasant folk mazurkas to Grieg’s majestic “Solveig song”. The music carries the characters away in a dizzying whirlwind of dance, lifts them above the ground (brilliant choreography by Oleg Glushkov) and brings down the curse of the sky on them with black giant beams breaking through the ceiling (scenic design by Alexei Kondratiev).

An astral connection with music is maintained by artists who amaze with some kind of wild animal plasticity and the ability to change their appearance in a matter of seconds. It is impossible to keep track of when and how villagers and village women turn into trolls and trollwomen, and then into Bedouins and concubines. Only occasionally did it strike the eye that the men and women in this jumping crowd were confused: no, no, and a snarling girl with a mustache or a man’s sly face in a cap would flash in the spotlight.

The appearance of a hero

The new hero of Lenkom, Anton Shagin, who made his debut on this stage last season in the role of Lopakhin (“The Cherry Orchard”), sparkles all over with the energy tearing him apart from within. This electric boy, possessing some kind of animal intuition and the ringing charm of youth, seemed to have missed through himself all the superheroes who had left this stage: Karachentsov, who had gone astray, Abdulov, Yankovsky, Yura Astafiev, who had left forever... Their invisible presence is felt on a subconscious level: either Zakharov he said something important about each one, or the actor himself recorded them in his emotional memory. The mediator between the world of shadows and the world of the living is Sergei Stepanchenko (Pugovichnik), who combines both Lucifer and the Philosopher. The Button Man is the eternal companion and eternal tempter of Peer Gynt (“Per, it’s time for you to be melted down! After all, your life has not worked out!”) - gives him the opportunity to be fed up with life, to swallow it avidly. To finally hear her true music at the end, the music of a Woman blinded by tears. And this is another hello to the past: Solveig (Alla Yuganova) clearly rhymes with Conchita, faithful to death to her Rezanov (“Juno and Avos”), and with Nele, the eternal bride of Til, who is dying on the chopping block.

The role of the funny Oza, who is laughing and in love with her son, suits Alexandra Zakharova very well, who knows how to dissolve in character roles, not being afraid of the most acute, eccentric manifestations. A woman clown in a black curly wig, cheerful and not aging, is ready to give her life for her unlucky son, and even dances into another world, never ceasing to smile with a wide childish smile. In “Peer Gynt” no one ages at all; Zakharov, echoing another classical hero who dreamed of immortality, conjures: “Stop a moment, you are wonderful!” - and the moments obey.

Mark Zakharov’s previous performance “The Cherry Orchard” - tragic, hysterical - was dedicated to departure, the finitude of life, it recorded human extinction. It was as if little by little light bulbs exploded and went blind in Ranevskaya’s soul, one after another. Peer Gynt is dedicated to spiritual rebirth, which is given as a reward to everyone who goes their own way and does not give up on it. He will not renounce his suffering, nor his betrayals, nor his sins. If your soul is no bigger than a button, let it become one after death. If your heart is still torn from pain, and your soul is able to hear love, there will be no melting down into buttons.

Would you like to see one of the most striking productions of the Lenkom Theater - the play Peer Gynt, an exciting musical blockbuster based on the epic of Henrik Ibsen? To enjoy the excellent acting, music and production itself, you should buy tickets for the performance of Peer Gynt in advance. You can order tickets by phone or using an application on our website.

Cost of tickets to Lenkom for the play Peer Gynt:

Grounds row 1-11: 6000-5000 rub.
Parterre row 12-14: 4500-3500 rub.
Amphitheater row 1-9: 4000-1800 rub.
Mezzanine row 1-9: 4000-1800 rub.

Reservation and delivery of tickets for the performance of Peer Gynt are included in the price.

The availability of tickets to the Lenkom Theater and their exact cost can be clarified by calling the numbers on the website.

Duration of the performance Peer Gynt: 2 hours. 15 minutes.

The play "" was staged on the stage of Lenkom by Mark Zakharov based on the drama of the same name by Henrik Ibsen.

Zakharov has his own concept of Ibsen's character. He does not agree with the interpretation of the image as a carrier of the idea of ​​compromise. According to the opinion, the hero is actually quite complex and resembles Chekhov's characters. He is simultaneously rude and gentle, courageous and humble. It is difficult to say about him who he really is.

According to Mark Zakharov, the last statement can be applied to every person. According to the director, the so-called “ordinary people” do not exist in the world. Everyone around us is quite complex.

Critics also note the image of Solveig in Ibsen's play. He is called even stronger and brighter than the image of Peer Gynt. This is a symbol of eternal love that saves human individuality. In the play, the role of Solveig was performed by Alla Yuganova. In the role of Peer Gynt - Anton Shagin, his mother Oze - Alexandra Zakharova, Ingrid - Svetlana Ilyukhina.

The production, of course, features the song Solveig by composer Edvard Grieg. The premiere of the play on the stage of the Moscow Lenkom Theater took place on March 25, 2011. This is one of the newest productions in the theater's repertoire.

Peer Gynt at the Lenkom Theater - video

Do you want to buy tickets to the performance of Peer Gynt at the Lenkom Theater? Call us at the numbers listed on the website or book tickets online!

CHARACTERS AND PERFORMERS

PEER GYNT - ANTON SHAGIN
OZE -
BUTTON MAKER -
SOLVEIG - ALICE SAPEGINA
INGRID -