Unseen Friend by Yury Osnos, Gorky Moscow Art Theater
By John Freedman
Published in The Moscow Times, May 2000
Unseen Friend, performed on the upstairs small stage of the Gorky Moscow Art Theater, is a bio-drama marking the 160th anniversary of the birth of the great composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Yury Osnos' play is standard fare -- it consists primarily of letters exchanged by Tchaikovsky and his benefactress Nadezhda von Mekk, with, for variety, a few scenes tossed in featuring Tchaikovsky's unbalanced wife Antonina and a couple of annoying male visitors.
Yury Gorobets, a talented actor who occasionally tries his hand at directing, has brought the work to the stage. Both he and his cast are so ardent in their admiration for the composer and his epistolary friend, that neither Tchaikovsky (Alexander Pogodin) nor von Mekk (Lyubov Matasova) quite seem real. I am far from suggesting that a realistic, hard-hitting expose of Tchaikovsky's alleged homosexuality and his strange and sometimes cruel treatment of his wife would have been a better approach. But painting a worshipful, "tactful," pastel-toned panegyric, as has been done here, is not much better.
The grateful composer and his greatest fan never met, and in that there is a tremendous amount of drama. Although von Mekk often supported Tchaikovsky financially and arranged lodgings for him during vacations -- they occasionally were quartered in the same town at the same time -- both realized that theirs was an inspirational and intellectual relationship. They never crossed the line to make personal acquaintance.
Gorobets expressed this physically by keeping Tchaikovsky to one half of the stage and von Mekk to the other even as they exchange epistles as if they were conversing in person. They seldom look at each other and never make eye contact. Only once does von Mekk enter the composer's territory, the only time in the show that she wavers and seems to crave meeting her idol.
Although I found Unseen Friend a weak, unconvincing show, I was still affected by its tale of the rare alliance between these two extraordinary people.
