Performance Warsaw Melody by Danila Kozlovsky. "Warsaw Melody" MDT - theater of Europe. "Warsaw Melody" - performance

Artistic director of the production Lev Dodin

Artist Alexey Porai-Koshits
(using an idea from David Borovsky)

Director Sergei Shchipitsin
(5th year student at Lev Dodin’s workshop, pre-graduation practice)

Gelya - Urszula Magdalena Malka

Victor - Danila Kozlovsky

A funny, absurd girl, speaking with a Polish accent, a student at the conservatory, a future great singer. And a young man who went through the war, a winemaker in Budu, a technologist, a creator of wines. They met at a concert where Chopin was playing, sat next to each other and suddenly this story began. Love story. They laughed, talked about life and forbade talking about the war, they learned to understand each other and invented “ideas” - they kissed in the museum behind the statues. They celebrated the year 1947 together, he gave her the red shoes she dreamed of, and she gave him a tie, but before that he had never worn a tie! They were together - Gelena and Victor, dancing on chairs, walking on bars, of which there are five, past the notes, to the music. And it seems that Victor is shouting correctly, how can this inhumane law prohibiting marriages with foreigners treat them! After all, they love... But they are just students, and what can they do with the country, with the state, with Stalin and with the law? He leaves for Krasnodar, she goes to Poland. They meet 10 years later - Gelya and Vitek, in Poland. She is a famous singer, he is a talented winemaker. They have families, and life didn’t seem to end then, in ’47. But what to do with the fact that she cannot live without him, that she remembers him every day, that she sees him at every concert - in the 4th row, what should she do with the fact that she cannot let him go? And he is a Soviet citizen and disciplinedly returns to sleep at the hotel, and does not go anywhere, does not go to spend the night - with her. And she flies back to her life - she rides off to the ceiling on a barbell.
And after another 10 years they meet again - in Moscow. She has a concert, and he gives her wine in her dressing room. She is divorced, his wife is now someone else's wife. But nothing can be returned. It's too late to change anything. He is no longer an arrogant, determined student, and she is no longer a straightforward, naive girl. Life has inexorably changed them, and how can one enter that river that has already flowed away? “There’s always not enough time - and that’s good,” says Victor, tearing up a piece of paper with the number of her hotel room. He won’t call, won’t come, and who needs that? Life ended for them then, in 1946, when the two of them listened to Chopin...

The music, the scenery - everything is good, everything is in tune with the performance, everything seems to be on one string. But everything passed me by. This is simply not my theater, this is simply not my thing. The performance is wonderful. Urszula Malka plays surprisingly easily, tenderly, beautifully. Danila Kozlovsky left a strange impression with his playing style, but one cannot say about him that he plays poorly.
It's just "not my thing." An alien hall, a constant feeling of a “wall” between what is happening on stage and the hall. Despite the fact that the action partially takes place between the rows. A purely Moscow approach to creating a performance. Not bad, no, just not my thing. My native St. Petersburg is closer to me. It’s not for nothing that the youth group is called a real St. Petersburg theater. In any performance, the spectator is a participant in the action, along with the actors. In any performance there is “flirting” with the audience, in the best sense of the word. And that's what I love.
And “Warsaw Melody” is like a film seen in a cinema. Beautiful, amazing, talented, but throughout the entire action you clearly understand that this is not real, this is just a game.
I am glad that I visited the MDT, that I watched this performance, that I saw what the “St. Petersburg Fomenko” Dodin is. It's valuable. But it left no emotions.

*
"WARSAW MELODY", L. Dodin, MALY DRAMATIC THEATER, St. Petersburg, 2007. (8)

The director skillfully switches registers right during the performance.
In the beginning, everything goes through the actors; the first part is played on young organics and charm. Doubts whether two yesterday’s students would be able to hold the attention of the thousand-strong auditorium of the Maly Theater immediately dissipated, the audience turned on from the very first remarks, an experienced viewer “feels it with his skin.”
Then, when the plot becomes schematic and largely banal (meeting 10 years later, meeting 20 years later), and it is difficult to expect students to fully transform into another age, scenography comes to the fore.

Zorin's "Warsaw Melody" is one of the most popular Soviet plays; it has many advantages. Classical structure (love play for two actors); the connection between private history and the Big History movement; bright and contrasting male and female images, and even with development; an eventful plot plan (love story) and an existential second bottom (the fate of a person).

But there are a couple of points that make the play more “popular” than “classical”.

The time of action is divided into three segments: 1946-7, 1956, 1966 (for the first productions of the play, the last segment meant “in our days,” now it’s all retro, three layers of archaeological excavations).
The first part, actually a love story with an unhappy ending, is written excellently, freshly, witty, it forms the dramatic core.
The two remaining parts - the afterword (10 years have passed) and the post-afterword (20 years have passed) - are schematic and, by and large, banal. But Zorin also has a third afterword (50 years have passed) - the play “Crossroads” (“Warsaw Melody-98”), it was staged at the Ermolova Theater and there the dramatic tension completely subsides.

By the way, this is what I don’t like about Wong Kar-wai’s favorite film “In the Mood for Love” - the same banal literary ending (“and then they met again many years later”), such endings are very similar to each other and have long turned into a dramatic cliche.

In the MDT performance, the director skillfully emphasized the merits of the play and tried to hide its shortcomings as much as possible.
The first part was played by young actors, yesterday's students, lively, sincerely, touchingly - as students can and should play.
And the direction here is not only “pedagogical”, it is not “direction that dies in the actors”, the first part is precisely “staged”.
Firstly, the love story is immediately taken into brackets, like a “memory” (the hero appears from the audience - a guy with glasses, a winter coat and a hat, and only then he becomes younger, turns into himself 20 years ago).
And, secondly, the scenes are played exactly like memories, the episodes are not separated from each other, but flow on top of each other, without breaks in time/place.

When staging subsequent parts, theatrical interest is fueled by the fact that the actors are given the opportunity to play their age, but this time it did not work. The actors finish their performance. She is not very convincing in the role of a “star”; she lacks charisma. And he already played all the “age-related changes” during the first release and is now chewing, solving a problem with an already known answer.
And here the director brings the scenography to the fore. He compensates for some of the acting duo's slump with a more intense metaphorical plan.

Clouds are floating, like piano notes

The scenography in the play is meaningful, imaginative, lively, dynamic. And it was made literally from nothing, vertical music stands with notes and five horizontal pipes - music rulers.
The picture at the beginning of the performance is good too - “white on white” (white sheets of music against the background of a white backdrop). A wonderful background for a love story that began in the conservatory and develops like a melody (from lyrical Chopin to dramatic Chopin). Melody is the key word in the title, the performance is staged as a melody. At the beginning, a melody of purely played notes appears in an acting duet. Then the stage space and decoration act as a melody.
The further you go, the more the background begins to move, play, and sound. The staff of music rises into the sky. On the musical line, the heroine rises under the grate (leaves for Poland). The lovers are swinging on the sheet music like on a swing. Active, dynamic scenography is the signature, strong point of Dodin’s performances (from “Home” and “Brothers and Sisters” to “Chevengur”).
The idea of ​​this decoration belongs to David Borovsky, which refers to the pillow clouds from the most lyrical performance of the Taganka Theater “Hope for a Little Orchestra”. At the climax, the white backdrop begins to move, throwing off the props (as the clothes of the drowned men slid off the white sheet). "Chevengure") is a simple and transparent metaphor for the historical flow.

The first part of the play was especially interesting to me, because the time of action, 1946-1947, was a special turning point in history. Unlike the well-known great turning point of 1929-1930, this turning point was hidden and closed, which poses a big mystery. Both in the play and in the performance a closed fracture is shown. A victorious mood, a new geopolitical reality - a Polish student studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and a decree banning marriages with foreigners, fatal for a private love story. The state is an external force that first brought the heroes together, made their meeting possible, and then separated them, turning their fate around. The ill-fated decree seems to me to be a significant event for Great History, as one of the evidence of a closed turning point in the state, as a clear sign of weakness, cowardice, something unnatural (after all, it is so natural that the victors take foreign wives).
There was a moment of historical fork in the road, for some time the country hesitated before making a choice, sufficient potential was gained for a breakthrough in order to jump out of the historical rut set by the civil war, close the civil war, cross it out with the Patriotic War. But it fell apart, broke, and remained in a well-worn rut.
The cowardice of the victorious state somehow rhymes with the male insufficiency of the hero, because his name is telling - Victor, the winner.
For the first time, the love story was interrupted because the Big Story made a sharp turn, the ground disappeared from under their feet, they could not resist. There is nothing to blame the heroes for, they tried, but there is no method against crowbar. And apparently for that effort they were given a second chance. After 10 years, when external obstacles were no longer insurmountable. But the hero did not take advantage of this chance, now he did not have enough courage, a closed fracture made itself felt (Vysotsky did not have this “closed fracture”, his story proves the real possibility of another path).
When the third chance appeared, there were no external obstacles left at all, but there was no desire left either. There are opportunities, but I don’t want to live (as old Kant said, “when I needed a woman, I didn’t have money for her, and when I got money, I didn’t need her anymore”:).
The fate of the hero rhymes with the fate of the country; the closed turning point of 1946 was never overcome, it manifested itself gradually, many years later, when the country gradually lost the desire to live and the instinct of self-preservation.

Thus, Dodin’s performance is an excellent addition to "a complete course of the history of the USSR in 30 performances", Chapter 4 exactly corresponds to the chronological framework of the play - 1946-1966.

Kalinary College student

And one more thing confuses me in the play is the elitism, “an extraordinary story that happened to extraordinary people.” The heroes are not simple, their professions are the most exotic and their social status is that of a general. Just a love story for a glossy magazine (from the series of Marilyn Monroe and Di Maggio, Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan).
The famous singer and doctor of wine sciences looks even more exotic than the flight attendant and physicist in Radzinsky’s “104 pages about love.”
A winemaker is also not a manly thing (“a bouquet writer”, almost a perfumer:), it would be a different matter if the hero were from Moldova or Georgia, and Russia is not a wine-producing country.
The fact that the heroine becomes famous (posters, tours) enhances the dramatic effect (not only is she Polish, she is also a star, an absolute “woman of dreams”). But the hero’s glamorous profession only weakens the dramatic tension and reduces the distance between the poles.
Only from the point of view of glamor does the exile to Krasnodar look so dramatic (what a bummer, it could have been Warsaw, Europe, but here it’s almost like Kryzhopol, complete Asia:), and his hesitation in response to her question about his wife’s profession (will she really say - “she works as a senior economist at SMU number nine”).
If afterwords are a dramatic banality, then elitism can be considered a kind of dramatic doping - in this case it is easier to answer the question about the character “who is he?”, and it is easier for the playwright to write about “his circle”. The playwrights of the first row knew how to do without such baits (we don’t know whether Shervinsky became a famous singer, and Lariosik became an academician, or maybe they perished in the Cheka or died of typhus, or became ordinary Soviet people).

It is very good that in the play MDT did not succumb to the temptation to play on the glamor of the characters and did not focus on winemaking. The hero does not at all look like a student at a calcinary technical school. By and large, it doesn’t matter where Victor studies - at the food institute, at the chemical-technological institute, or at the institute of steel and alloys. Both heroes look simpler and more natural here, without gloss. After all, she is not a “proud Pole”, Polish charm is present, but there is much more simplicity and naturalness in her, feminine weakness, than ambition. Urszula Malka is a natural Pole, but it is not at all noticeable that she has to translate, and her accent is just right (maybe the words spoken to Helena by her father also apply to the actress - learn Russian, it will come in handy).
Danila Kozlovsky is very convincing both in the role of a young front-line officer in 1946 (by the way, the actor graduated from the Kronstadt Naval Cadet Corps - and this is evident), and in the role of a guy in glasses in 1966 (but this had to be “played”, the props here are very helped - a pie hat, astrakhan collar).

Having two such students on the course - a Polish girl and a graduate of the cadet corps - it is impossible not to stage “The Warsaw Melody”.

L. Zorin. "Warsaw Melody". Maly Drama Theater - Theater of Europe.
Artistic director of the production Lev Dodin, director Sergei Shchipitsin, artist Alexey Poray-Koshits

“Ah, pane-panove, ah, pane-panove, there’s not a penny of heat...”

Helena Velikanova sang the cult cycle of “Polish” songs by Bulat Okudzhava - Agnieszka Osiecka for the Sovremennik play “The Taste of Cherries” around the same 1960s, when the Polish singer Helena sang on many stages of the USSR in the cult “Warsaw Melody”. Different songs were played in different theaters, but all the “Warsaw melodies” (Yulia Borisova in Moscow, Lyudmila Kryachun in Sverdlovsk...) protested against borders, totalitarian laws, Soviet careerism and male cowardice. The Leningrad melody sounded for many years, flowing and shimmering with the soft Polish “tshe” of Alisa Freindlich, who played the legendary love story in those years when Lev Dodin began directing.

“What happened is gone, you can’t get it back…” sang Gelena Velikanova. Today, forty years later, Dodin takes the stage as a gray-haired artistic director of the production of his student Sergei Shchipitsin, who made the play with his classmates.

“This piece cannot be played! What a stupid text…” I hear the voices of my colleagues after the premiere. They say that the story about how a conservatory student and the future winemaker Victor (winner!), who went through the war, met at a Chopin concert and fell in love with each other, how a law was passed prohibiting marriages with foreigners, and how there were two more meetings ten years apart - first in Warsaw, then at the concert of the famous singer Helena in Moscow. And how a Polish girl turned out to be a person capable of loving all her life, singing her “Warsaw melody” for many years, and the Soviet “winner”, whose ear (read - soul) was stepped on by a bear, made a career... Is history outdated? In reality, it is probably difficult for today’s young viewers to understand why a Soviet business traveler who arrived in Warsaw in 1957 is afraid to leave the hotel for the night with the woman he loves. But, I believe, today’s successful winemaker, who arrived in the capital for the day from Krasnodar (the third act of the play), is quite capable of understanding the torment of a business person deciding - the business of the company or a nostalgic date?..

That's not even the point. The story of love and conformist betrayal, submission to circumstances that we do not choose, is not outdated.

It is important which note to take in this melody, which plot to read, which score to play.

Photo by V. Vasiliev

Alexey Poray-Koshits (using the idea of ​​David Borovsky) said a lot with his design. On thin-legged music stands placed on the white “winter” stage, there are sheets of sheet music with different melodies - choose any one and play the music of your life. Music stands with music also glow on the thin rails. Oscillating back and forth, they look like the “music of the spheres” or the starry sky above us (after all, the play is about the moral law within us...). You can sit on these yards and you can climb on them. And each time, the thin-legged Helena, leaving Victor on the ground, rises up, only to come down a different one after a while. Not a pale girl in a brown dress, but an elegant Polish lady in a miniskirt and hat (oh, “Zucchini 13 Chairs” of the same 60s - a black and white television window to Europe with fashionable ladies in exactly the same costumes!). Not a fragile Warsaw celebrity, ready (“to hell!”) to give up all her well-being for the sake of love, but a strong, businesslike, tired “Anna German” in a concert dress, looking at things soberly, but... again ready to escape.

“And the cold morning will wake up. And no one will return here..."

The play was taken because Urszula Magdalena Malka, a natural Pole, studied in Dodin’s course. There is no need to imitate the accent. Malka nervously and seriously leads her melody. Only she was unlucky with her partner.

There were always problems with the Victors - the winners. “Now you, then I, then I, then you...” Alisa Freundlich sang, but this swing (now she, now he) did not work, Freundlich’s partners only accompanied her amazing solo (only for a short time Anatoly Solonitsyn became Victor).

U. Malka (Gelya), D. Kozlovsky (Victor).
Photo by V. Vasiliev

I haven’t seen Mikhail Ulyanov, on whom this role fit - like a jacket on the good back of the hero, and the current Victor - Danila Kozlovsky, the new glamorous young hero of MDT, as if he came not from the war, but from a modern series about rosy-cheeked lieutenants, takes on from the very beginning a hopelessly false note and, to his credit, he conscientiously pulls it out to the end, without giving the role a single moment of authenticity. It’s as if he doesn’t have eyes, but only a mouth that intensively articulates words, which is no longer the first role. Dripping with sweat, which indicates a colossal psychophysical stress, Kozlovsky diligently, with the diligence of a first student, “star” and thoughtlessly shows himself from his advantageous side, believing that the advantageous side is not the profile, but the front itself with a tense “Hollywood” smile... Conduct a dialogue , constantly wanting to turn his face to the audience, it is difficult for him... Of all the feelings, Kozlovsky clearly conveys one thing - a feeling of joyful narcissism: he is young, he is considered handsome. Narcissism, of course, can be a property of the character, Victor, but, alas, it relates to the performer. And it turns out that Urszula Malka hits her partner as if she were hitting a wall. At the same time, Kozlovsky does not feel like an accompanist, as Anatoly Semenov once did in a duet with Freundlich, he wants to be a soloist. Only he, like his hero, “had a bear step on his ear.”

So they draw out this melody: one - nervously, uncertainly and purely, the other - victoriously out of tune and not even bothering to change the “offered”: ten years have passed... ten more...

What are they singing about?

U. Malka (Gel).
Photo by V. Vasiliev

It is about the ability of an extraordinary woman to love exceptionally, about the “transformation” of an ugly duckling into a beauty, about how the inner steel is tempered in every woman, about male pragmatism, which is useless to resist.

“Without love and warmth, nature is so bitter. The crowd at the beer stall has thinned out..."

He presses the keys of some plotless scale, but the motive of the actor’s inner bewilderment involuntarily arises: what, exactly, is the problem? Actor D. Kozlovsky seems to reinforce the hero Victor with his own worldview: guys, what are we talking about? Everything was right! Life is good! He, Victor, succeeded, defended his doctorate, she, Gelya, is in a busy touring regime, both are successful, doing business, what more could you want? To bow for bouquets - in two jumps, almost a somersault! Winner!

Where does this intonation come from, this random twist that became an interpretation? I think, not from the original plan of the young S. Shchipitsin, but from the general mood of the time, which is stronger than any plan, from the success of the theater where the performance is performed, in general from the category of “success”, which corrodes the consciousness. Luck is a synonym for joy, success is a synonym for happiness, comfort is a synonym for love. Zorin wrote precisely that success has nothing to do with happiness, but...

“But the end of the carnival is already looming. An autumn leaf flies like a messenger of separation..."

“Warsaw Melody” is an old-fashioned play about “another love.” In a performance of modern times, “there is not a penny of warmth,” the audience often laughs at the cult melodrama of the 60s, which does not touch the heart. After all, if we proceed from today’s pragmatic norms, everything is correct, there is nothing to regret - “what happened was what happened, you can’t return it”!

« ...It will be a long night on the cold ground. And the cold morning will wake up. And no one will return here...“- Velikanova sang Okudzhava’s poems.

Deep works about love are always relevant, which is why many directors turn to Leonid Zorin’s play “Warsaw Melody”, written back in the 60s. The play in a new production by L. Dodin appeared in the repertoire of the European Theater in 2007 and has been drawing full houses ever since.
The touching and sad story continues to excite the audience's hearts. The audience empathizes with the heroes, the lovers were separated by circumstances and boundaries, they managed to carry their feelings through the years, but never became happy. The next performance of the play “Warsaw Melody” at the Moscow Drama Theater will take place in the spring and will allow us to once again touch the chronicle of two destinies.

"Warsaw Melody" - performance

The new production grew out of the graduation performance of two talented students of director L. Dodin: Urszula Malka and Evgeniy Sannikov. Successful student work has strengthened, crystallized and enriched the theater’s repertoire. The choice of material was not accidental, because the artist, like her heroine, came to study from Poland. Urszula plays superbly, striking with the naturalness of her image, and in her speech there is a slight accent, which is so opportune...
The content of the chamber performance “Warsaw Melody” takes the viewer to post-war Moscow. There are only two characters in the play. He is a former front-line soldier with the name of the winner - Victor and came to the capital to study winemaking, she is Polish Helena, a future singer, and now a student at the conservatory.

By the will of fate, they find themselves at a classical music concert, their chairs are next to each other. Chopin sounds, random glances, nascent feelings that develop into a stormy and passionate romance. Explanations, hopes, plans. And all this collapses in an instant: a law is passed banning marriages with foreign citizens.
Victor and Helena meet again ten years later, they walk around Warsaw, immersed in memories. Both have families and successful careers, but are they happy?
Time flies inexorably, another ten years are behind us. And a new meeting is already in Moscow. Unhappy marriages have broken up, it seems that holding is pushing them into embraces. But everyone is dressed in their own way, afraid to change their established life. A sad ending, but so familiar to many in the audience, as you can read about in the reviews of “Warsaw Melody”.
The theatrical performance lasts two hours and a quarter. And all this time, the attention of those sitting in the hall of the MDT St. Petersburg is riveted on the acting talent of the play “Warsaw Melody,” which holds them with the iron grip of a talented performance.

Scenography of the production “Warsaw Melody”

The scenery on stage is minimal: chairs, music stands with scores laid out. And a wide white stripe hanging from the grates, symbolizing time and the path of life. On it, the designer A. Poraj-Kosits placed theatrical bars; they depict a staff of music, with notebooks perched as notes.

According to the director’s idea, the white fabric in the final part of the play “Warsaw Melody in St. Petersburg” stretches, destroys the arranged attributes, just as the dreams and hopes of the heroes in love were once destroyed.
For the musical accompaniment of the theatrical performance, the music of Chopin, Vars, and Fradkin was chosen.
According to audience reviews, the performance “Warsaw Melody” at the MDT is very lyrical with a touch of gentle sadness. The subtle acting and interesting stage design are highly appreciated.
You can buy tickets for “Warsaw Melody” to see a wonderful performance in two clicks on our website.
The nearest metro stations from the stage are “Dostoevskaya” and “Vladimirskaya”.

“Warsaw Melody” is a touching story from the recent, but already well-forgotten Soviet past. This is a story about opportunities missed against our will and time gone by, about the fact that love is a very fragile and priceless gift, over which time, it turns out, is not so powerless. For many years, theatergoers of different generations shed tears over the dramatic scenes of this play by L. Zorin, but today it sounds especially bright, reflecting the absurdity of the Soviet regime and its destructive influence on the destinies of people. A new reading of this story by Lev Dodin, together with Sergei Shchipitsyn, gave birth to the wonderful performance of the Maly Drama Theater “Warsaw Melody”: many people buy tickets for this production with their entire families.

In fact, there have been many such stories in the past: a Russian guy falls in love with a foreigner. But they can't be together because of a stupid law prohibiting marriages with foreigners. Lovers can only meet once every 10 years. Both of them are changing, each has their own life, and in the end it becomes clear that they simply don’t need to be together anymore, and do they even want to? Together with the audience who bought tickets to MDT’s “Warsaw Melody”, Dodin reflects on the recent past, remembering at the same time the good things that were in it: music, youth, love... And the weightless, as if from a magical dream, A. Poray’s scenery -Košica reinforce the impression that external realities are illusory and unstable, and only true feelings are important.