Seven Saints from the Village of Bryukho by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Stanislavsky Drama Theater
By John Freedman
Published in The Moscow Times, December 2003
You have to love Vladimir Mirzoyev for his independence. Here is a director who, over the last half-decade, rose beyond the status of cult figure to bona fide popularity with a series of often obscure, though strangely evocative productions based on the classics. His oversized, epic interpretations of Moliere’s Amphitryon, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and, recently, Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Vakhtangov Theater have been big hits for that playhouse while seldom straying far from controversy.
What a surprise, then, to see the show that he chose to kick off his tenure as the new artistic director at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater. Not that this production of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Seven Saints from the Village of Bryukho won’t cause its share of talk. It presumably will. That is what Mirzoyev’s shows do. Fire burns, water cools and Mirzoyev instigates debate.
No, what intrigues here is the way the director rejected the large canvas style that has brought him such success of late and, in part, at least, returned to a more intimate and mystical atmosphere. As a staff director at the Stanislavsky in the ‘90s, Mirzoyev created a handful of shows that were so difficult to define, critics and spectators alike gave them a wide berth. These short-lived pieces included Alexei Kazantsev’s That, This Other World, a vague though often beautiful show representing a man’s thoughts on the verge of death; and In Search of the Beautiful, a show combining modern dance, physical theater and music and based on the esoteric teachings of Georgy Gurdjieff.
The first half, especially, of Seven Saints seems to have grown directly out of these older shows. Whether today’s audiences will be any more receptive to it than they were to similar shows in the past remains to be seen. But it is just like Mirzoyev to go about his business without wasting time asking himself such questions.
Ulitskaya, best known as the author of the story Sonechka and such novels as Medea and Her Children and The Kukotsky Case, would appear to have written a fairly traditional play about some unusual people in a small Russian village shortly after the Revolution. The first half focuses primarily on the odd, rather imperious Dusya (Olga Lapshina), a wheelchair-bound woman with mysterious powers who has attracted a large following of women and men who turn to her in times of need. The second half focuses on Rogov (Alexander Samoilenko), a local thug who has seized control of the village and is determined to bring everyone in it under his power.
Mirzoyev plays theatrical games with almost everyone and everything in the story. At first glance it is difficult to determine where the action takes place. The plain white walls lining Vladimir Kovalchuk’s set would satisfactorily imitate those of a monastery, an insane asylum or a typical Soviet community hall space. By the same token, the behavior of Dusya and the women surrounding her might indicate equally that they are nuns or crazies. This ambiguity is characteristic of Mirzoyev and expands the scope of the production by giving it numerous possible interpretations.
Dusya sits in a huge chair that is as much a baby’s high chair as it is a wheelchair. She leads, castigates and protects a gaggle of vastly different women, including the pious Antonina (Natalya Orlova) and the temperamental upstart Marya (Natalya Pavlenkova). One of them, Manya, is a man masquerading as a female. This is one mystery that Mirzoyev tips off up front – by casting the actor Lera Gorin in the role of the bizarre, Buddah-like woman.
As played by Lapshina, Dusya is both entirely focused and eccentric at the same time. Jilted by her fiancé in her youth and unable to walk, she tends to a brood of “children” represented by dolls that she repeatedly pulls out to play with. She is always ready to offer valuable advice to people in distress – such as Timosha (Anton Eldarov), the youth who goes AWOL from serving under Rogov, or Father Vasily (Valery Simonov), a priest who fears being accused of stealing icons.
But it is not the story itself or even the characterizations that define the first half of this show. Using the rich layers of folk music performed by the entire cast plus the vocalists Anastasia Begunova and Lada Maris, and setting the musical segments in unusual dance patterns choreographed by Artur Oshchepkov, Mirzoyev creates a ritualistic, otherworldly atmosphere, seductive in the self-evident beauty of its mystery. These people, blessed in some way that may not meet the average eye, live in a semi-dream state where child’s play and the grace of God are indistinguishable. Moving slowly and gently about the stage, the characters appear to caress each other’s unseen souls with large, rhythmic gestures of the hands concentrated around the head. In springy, hopping steps, they move about the stage as if percolating.
The world of Dusya and her women is not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. It is fraught with problems, tragic and petty. This is not a place of divine perfection, but one where the clumsiness of life exists on a single plane with divinity. That all comes to an end when Rogov intrudes.
The second half of Seven Saints undergoes an abrupt change in genre and style. The hazy, suggestive ambiance of the first half is now replaced by what is almost conventional theatrical satire. Rogov – a Joseph Stalin look-alike who nonchalantly asks a make-up woman to glue his moustache back on each time it falls off – has not only come to ferret out the errant Timosha, but to enlist others in his effort to conquer the town. It takes him no time at all to bring the unthinking, unprincipled Nadya (Lyudmila Kozakova) and the town drunkard Golovanov (Mark Geikhman) over to his side as he ploys them with a poisonous mix of facetious courtesy and cruelty. After appointing them his helpers, he tricks them into signing death warrants in blood and coerces the terrified Timosha into becoming his executioner, the quivering man who will make saints of Dusya and six others.
When the weird and wonderful music and dances of the first half are reprised now, the effect is vastly different. Rogov’s search of Dusya’s abode is a mocking, desecrated echo of the joy and innocence that similar scenes had evoked earlier.
Seven Saints from the Village of Bryukho appears to be Mirzoyev’s attempt to get back in touch with a technique that he experimented with and then abandoned several years ago. Frankly, the results are uneven. Though often mesmerizingly beautiful, the obscurity of the first half can be daunting. Meanwhile, the traditional tragicomedy of the second half, though clear as a bell, can lack the richness of Mirzoyev’s best work. But on the whole, this show works because its sincerity is tangible.
Mirzoyev, stepping into place as the Stanislavsky’s new leader, has sent a message that he plans to do more than merely duplicate past successes.
