Since very few of the interested ticket holders for today's and tomorrow's premiere have already seen the production, and even the photographers filmed only the first part, before intermission ... In general, retelling what they saw is just a spoiler. And to philosophize about what I saw - I will not start soon at all.

Moreover, by no means the whole performance completely fell on the soul and disintegrated along the cerebral convolutions. There were moments when I was just bored ... However, there were moments when I was literally afraid to breathe - great! I even cried once ... probably in an unexpected for many, but personally for me associated moment ...

A few sketches ... those who are expecting the premiere will not put together a puzzle of them, but I need to speak out at least a little.

... The glow is like a white aurora borealis on a black sky, which in one of the scenes turns into flashes of fire ...

A city destroyed to the ground ... What is it - Berlin or Volgograd, Aleppo or Grozny? ..

I don’t know how in St. Petersburg, but in Moscow the director EVEN MORE exposes his artists (those who have seen Othello will appreciate the selection of the text) ...

How differently they run! And only one walks calmly - with bare feet on a glittering surface - like on water ...

The phrase about pine trees is the only phrase uttered by the character. And also - a lighter for a cigarette and left hugging ... so he is on his side? ..

In the first scene, static characters begin to move. Is it worth tracking in what order they start to move? Or is it an accident and does not mean anything at all? ..

In general, all the actors play great. Pleased the youth: on a par with the masters ...

Or (a friend, having seen the first photographs from the play, wrote): the luminous "EAT" in addition to the Bogomolovka "TRINK" ...

If these are shooting stars, then why do they cover the earth with huge, killable hailstones? ..

Andreas in the final looks like Erdman's Podsekalnikov. Condemn? Then let the one who is the first to throw the stone, and go to the barricades in the first rows. Moreover, are those who there, in the Newspaper Quarters, painted the white heavenly radiance the color of blood so right? ..

So baby strollers or ammunition boxes? ...

In general, before going to watch the performance again today, I will quote: “Alexander Matrosov:“ The work is not finished yet, everything is changing, and will change until the last second. Constant changes concern not only artists, but text, light, sound. I'll even take the liberty - I'm not sure of the final result at the premiere performances on November 11 and 12, during the premiere days. "

This is wonderful.

But - they will leave (they also left the runs). This is not even annoying anymore (although one of the 20 who left will definitely leave a review, in which “crawling” will allegedly leave with him - ha!).

RG, November 16, 2016

Alena Karas

We dance swing!

In the Theater named after A.S. Pushkin played a play by Brecht

At the performance of Yuri Butusov, music reigns with its victorious, fatal power. The aesthetics of rock cabaret dominate the mechanics of perception, and it seems that both actors and spectators - hostages of this overwhelming energy - are losing the critical judgment that was so important to the mature Brecht. Pump, drive, hang, swing - let's dance! We dance, as Butusov himself danced in the finale of his satirikonovskoy "The Seagull". It seems that already staging "The Kind Man from Cezuan" at the Theater. Pushkin, Butusov was a hostage of his love for early Brecht with his volatile, gaseous expressiveness and almost narcotic, dreamlike logic.

"Drums in the night", written by Brecht in 1918 in connection with the uprising of "Spartacus" swiftly and recklessly, later he himself was subjected to severe criticism. But in 18, he didn't care if his hero, the soldier Kragler ... was a petty bourgeois who had escaped from the revolution under her skirt to her returning bride. It was important to him that it was the man himself who was twisted in the millstones of systems and political manipulations, his tears and blood were pouring "in the jungle of cities" (this was the name of another wonderful play by the young Brecht), that he was being killed in wars while his bride was trying to marry another.

On the huge stage of the Theater. Pushkin, stripped to a high brick wall, Kragler - the flying, gaseous hero of Timofey Tribuntsev - appears in a bride's dress, fooling around and losing outlines every minute, like a ghost, a dybuk terrorizing the living, not allowing freeing from the past. "No corpses in our bed!" - Hysterically calls out the new groom Murk (Alexander Matrosov), who himself looks like a drowned man with a white face.

White balls of lanterns illuminate the mirror of the stage, creating a festive and scary ball of ghosts, in which the mother with a long white braid (Ivan Litvinenko) looks more like death, and the father (Alexei Rakhmanov), with a bare torso, is dancing the dance of a hopeless life with his daughter.

The stage is filled with scraps of nightmares, stories about the bones of soldiers decaying in Africa, the newspaper Babush (Vera Voronkova), happily telling about the uprising, Kragler himself, either returning from the fields of the First World War, or decaying there to a black mummy and coming to the world of the living to embarrass their conscience. Does it not resemble the glowing cabaret of the Ball of the Hanged People by Arthur Rimbaud or the equally famous in the history of the theater "The Deceased Class" by Tadeusz Kantor with his dead dolls mourning the living?

The aesthetics of the cabaret every now and then falls into a circus clownery, in which the hero of Alexander Matrosov Murk plays a terrible pantomime of the funeral of a child, apparently never born to his bride.

Sometimes it seems that the play, the action of which is taking place today, now, on this November evening, becomes a mechanical dance of death. And the more terrible is that this dance is not cold, but filled with unimaginable energy, dedication and passion. Sitting in the front row, I could no longer distinguish between faces and voices, obeying an endless somnambulistic rhythm, and the sound of the drums became more and more nightmarish. The drums in the night are a memory devoid of meaning, a bubbling of dibucks and ghosts who have forever taken our bodies for their mechanical use. After all, if lessons are not learned from the past, it overtakes like a zombie.

When by the second act it becomes almost unbearable to look at this dance, Butusov and his co-author, artist Alexander Shishkin, send us on a strange journey to the Berlin Wall, a real obsession of this theatrical year (remember Viktor Ryzhakov's play "Sasha, take out the trash" at the CIM).

In front of the wide-open brick wall of Pushkin's stage, the soft cover of the screen, white as a shroud, falls, and documentary footage appears on it. On them innocently, as if in a comedy, some workers, winking at each other, lay brick on brick. Stone to stone, slab to slab. Before the townspeople on both sides have time to blink their eyes, take off their hats, throw up their umbrellas, a huge wall grows between them. Their faces, surprised at first, are covered with tears and grimaces of despair. Then the windows of a huge brick house are covered with bricks, and the house becomes blind. Then under it grow small crosses and tablets with the names of the victims of the Wall ...

When we return to the cabaret at night, Kragler, with his new-found bride Anna, passionately and bitterly played by Alexandra Ursulyak, turns into a common man, hovering in front of a TV screen, from where he may be called back to a new war. And the drums will sound more and more insistently and louder, until in the very finale, already on the bows, they turn into a real divertissement, which the admiring audience applauds to exhaustion, like at rock concerts.

Teatral, 15 November 2016

Marina Shimadina

For whom the drums beat

Yuri Butusov has released a new performance based on Brecht at the Pushkin Theater, which is doomed to become one of the main hits of the season

Tickets for Drums in the Night at the Pushkin Theater were sold out long before the premiere, and at the first shows people stood on the balconies - and this is on a little-known Brecht play with a rather poor stage fate (ten years ago at the Et Cetera theater, it went almost unnoticed). But even if Yuri Butusov decided to put on the phone book, the hall would be full.

We love this director like no one else - to adoration. They love him for his expression, for open emotion, for ecstatic dances and the energy of rock concerts, which you will not find anywhere else in the theater. All this, to the delight of fans, is also present in the new production. It can even be said that Butusov staged his ideal performance: not as restrained and cautious as his first work in Pushkin's "The Kind Man from Cezuan", but not as insanely chaotic as, say, Macbeth. Cinema "at the Lensovet Theater. And the "Drums" do not last six hours, like the ever-memorable "Seagull" in the "Satyricon", but humane three and a half.

In general, this is a classic Butusovskoe "Brecht cabaret": a half-empty stage, sometimes bare to bricks with a drum kit in the middle, neon signs descending from grates with directions, an indefinite time and place of action, characters like freaks and a lot, a lot of music (full list compositions would take up half of the program, so they modestly wrote there - the soundtrack by Yu.Butusov). In the first act, it seems that this disco under the Prodigy, where the artists beat as if under electric shock, is even too much. Although everyone moves perfectly - here you need to pay tribute to the choreographer Nikolai Reutov. But the director, apparently, needs to first warm up the audience to a certain degree, prepare its perception, in order to then stun with incredible visionary films.

Drums in the Night is a small early play by Brecht about a soldier who returned from the war to his girlfriend, who did not wait for him and became engaged to another. But Butusov is not attracted to her by the social message about the unjust structure of society - war and revolution in newspaper districts exist somewhere on the periphery of his performance. And in the foreground - despair, fear, love, loneliness and restlessness of a person in this large and indifferent world.

The director manages to carve out strong emotions by generally simple means: at the beginning of the second act, all the characters slowly move in a line from the depths of the stage, and the wind rinsing their cloaks and dresses more and more. And then everyone suddenly freezes and only gently sways back and forth, like those hanged in a noose ... The picture is terrifying to the point of shivers.

And what about the tragic pantomime of an unlucky groom who buries his imaginary, unborn child, because his bride wants to get rid of an unwanted offspring. And when from above, like manna from heaven, glowing balls descend and fall on the stage (the artist Alexander Shishkin, as always, is on top), the hall, contrary to Brecht's precepts, completely loses its ability to analyze something and turns into a continuous admiring "ah". It's just terribly beautiful and sad.

But the main success of the performance is the ensemble, where even minor roles like the waiter Manke performed by Anastasia Lebedeva are a small masterpiece. What can we say about the main ones. Alexandra Ursulyak as Anna is a black and white swan at the same time, a gorgeous vamp woman and an absurd clown all rolled into one. Incredibly plastic, with a hoarse, as if torn voice, bewildered and attractive - she certainly is the tuning fork of the performance. Alexander Matrosov plays her fiancé Murka as an outwardly polished and boorish businessman, but internally insecure former hard worker who still feels how unstable the soil is under him and how changeable fortune. It seems that he is constantly pointing to his new shoes in order to convince himself - you, guy, deserve it ... And Timofey Tribuntsev, invited from Satyrikon, where he performed Iago in Butusov's Othello, turned out to be an excellent candidate for the role of Kragler - a nervous, beaten with life and covered with invisible ulcers, a soldier who returned from Algerian captivity.

There is something of Wojzeck Büchner in him - resignation to fate, the trampled pride of a little man and a desire for revenge, which pushes him to the barricades. But revolutionary impulses are forgotten as soon as the beloved woman returns to him. The former soldier puts on a jacket, round glasses and becomes remarkably similar to Bertolt Brecht himself. And when he reads Pasternak's poem: “I want to go home, to the vastness of an apartment that makes me feel sad,” the parallel only intensifies. This is a writer who dreams of his quiet desktop, of a boring peaceful life in the midst of historical turmoil.

Brecht himself took part in the November 1918 revolution, but quickly became disillusioned with politics and took up literature, in particular - "Drums in the Night". Subsequently, he was dissatisfied with this play, reworked it and condemned the petty-bourgeois act of his hero, who preferred personal happiness to class interests. But Butusov does not share this opinion. He admires the playwright's bright expressionist, not yet unraveled, colors in a new translation by Yegor Peregudov. And in the finale he simply sings a hymn to the man in the street. Let fires rage on footage and houses collapse, the hero and his newly found family will sit quietly at the TV ... Fight yourself ... And if at that moment someone in the hall is nobly indignant - but what about the fight against the forces of darkness, criminal power and so on? - the director quickly put him in his place, putting credits on the backdrop ... After all, we ourselves sit in front of the screen / stage and have a good time. And let the drums beat somewhere in the night, they do not beat on us ...

Vedomosti, 24 November 2016

Gleb Sitkovsky

Cabaret of the Dead

Yuri Butusov staged Drums in the Night - an early play by Bertolt Brecht

The main character of the play at the Moscow Pushkin Theater is a dead soldier who no longer wants to fight.

Yuri Butusov has a Brechtian period. At least his brightest successes in the last few seasons are somehow connected with the name of Bertolt Brecht. In 2013, he released "The Kind Man from Sezuan" (Moscow Pushkin Theater), in 2014 - "Cabaret" Brecht "(St. Petersburg Lensovet Theater), and the current" Drums in the Night ", thus, can be regarded as the final part trilogy. Each of these performances is done in a retro cabaret style, and Drums in the Night is no exception: the actors fenced themselves off from the hall with a typical cabaret frame consisting of lamps.

Compared to the rest of the trilogy "Drums" look much creepy even at the first glance at the stage (set design and costumes by Alexander Shishkin). The lively cabaret space is inhabited by sexless freaks who seem to have just risen from hell. The father of the family (Alexei Rakhmanov), who claims that he cut himself while shaving, is for this reason covered with blood from head to toe, and his tearful wife in male performance (Ivan Litvinenko) is deathly pale, wears a braid over his shoulders and generally looks more like Death. In the same inferno-clown manner, other characters of the play are solved, and the rest of the roles are distributed among the actors with the same negligence in relation to their gender identity. The dead have neither shame nor sex.

The plot of the play (written immediately after the First World War, when Brecht was barely 20) does not shine with originality. In essence, this is the umpteenth variation of the myth of Odysseus, who, years later, returned to his Penelope, when she was about to get married. Only Andreas Kragler (Timofey Tribuntsev) fought not for Troy, and don’t understand why somewhere in Africa, he was absent for only four years, and Anna (Alexandra Ursulyak) besieged him not by a hundred suitors, but only one, and his name is Friedrich Murch (Alexander Matrosov). The characters of "Drums" now and then call Andreas a decomposed corpse, a living corpse or a ghost, but in this performance they themselves did not go far from him.

Apparently, Butusov saw the key to the play in The Legend of the Dead Soldier, which was first performed in his previous performance, Cabaret Brecht, and now echoed again. This is a zong about a dead soldier who was taken out of the grave by the Motherland and found fit to die for her again: “Two orderlies followed him. / They watched vigilantly: / How would the dead man crumble to dust - / God forbid! / They are a black-white-red banner / Carry, so that through the smoke and dust / None of the people could see / Behind the flags this rot ”.

In Butusov's play, the dead Andreas Kragler does not return home, as it seemed to him, but to the same dead as he - to the macabre world, where the night never ends, and drum rolls are not able to bring the dawn closer. With a frequency of about 10 minutes, the same scene is played out in front of us: convulsively grabbing the drumsticks, the characters embark on an ecstatic dance that seems to simply personify their vitality, but after the fifth or sixth repetition of this energy flash, you realize that before us nothing more than the galvanized dead.

Yuri Butusov turned Brecht's play into a variation on the medieval Dance of Death, in which the entire society is involved. The war rumbled in the distance is coming closer and closer to their homes, and a revolution is already flaring up in the newspaper districts, but the dancers do not care about this. At some point on the backdrop, the remark "EATING" is displayed, and although nothing happens on the stage at that second, it seems that we are talking about the dead, feeding on carrion. Somewhere in the background a wordless character in a crown of thorns loiters, and on the program Butusov decided to bring out the medieval "Pieta", where the dead Christ rests in the arms of the Mother of God, but the characters of "Drums in the Night" seem to be denied a chance of resurrection from the dead.

“The Legend of the Soldier” ends with the words: “But the stars are not forever above your head. / The sky is painted with dawn - / And again a soldier, as they taught him, / He died like a hero. " And nevertheless, in the finale of the play, the dead Andreas Kragler refuses to die again on the orders of the Fatherland. “Every man is good if he doesn't get into heroes,” he says and sits down in front of the TV, which broadcasts nothing but “snow”. Blessed is he who does not fight.

Lenta .Ru, 23 November 2016

Anna Banasyukevich

Three people in the boat crashed into everyday life

"Drums in the Night" by Butusov as a personal experience of historical catastrophes

On November 11, the Moscow Drama Theater named after Pushkin hosted the premiere of the play "Drums in the Night" directed by Yuri Butusov based on the play of the same name by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Circus and cabaret are perhaps the main sources of Butusov's latest performances, mixing enchanting framing and direct, sometimes publicistic statement. In recent years, Butusov, despite his staging scope and rich set of stage effects, chose Brecht as one of his favorite authors - with his plays written for the theater of direct influence, a theater of sharp, expressive, but at the same time ascetic and shy of luxury. In St. Petersburg, his performance “Cabaret. Brecht ", and the Pushkin Theater has been showing" The Kind Man from Sesuan "for almost three years.

This time, Butusov took an early text by Brecht, the comedy (by definition of the playwright himself) Drums in the Night, written in 1919 (the second edition was made in 1954). The play, which lasts three and a half hours, really gravitates towards the genre of comedy - sometimes the bitter thoughts of Brecht, put into the mouth of the protagonist, a soldier who is no longer needed by anyone who returned from war, from captivity, are drowned in a mass of inventive theatrical tricks, dissolve into extremely rich, dense musical and choreographic fabric of the performance. And only when the performance slows down, when the general, alluringly picturesque, plan is replaced by a large and unprotected actor is alone with the audience, the text about the unimportant arrangement of this “little star” sounds distinctly and honestly, like a personal experience of historical catastrophes.

The plot of Brecht's small play is simple: Andreas Kragler went to war and never returned; four years later, his fiancée Anna is going to marry the manufacturer Murk, her father's partner. At the time of the engagement, Kragler returns, but Anna is already pregnant. The soldier goes to taverns, to prostitutes, to neighborhoods where revolutionary-minded proletarians are raging. But Anna starts to follow, and the returned personal happiness extinguishes the political pathos of the offended Andreas, who declares to his new associates and the public that he prefers bed and reproduction to heroic death for an idea.

The performance by Butusov is done in the style of a cabaret: the stage is framed by a number of large lamps, sometimes glowing with an even white light, or flashing lights. There is a character, a girl in a man's suit, with slicked white hair, with a comical burr - in the play this is a waiter, but at Butusov she is an entertainer (Anastasia Lebedeva), commenting on what is happening, announcing intermission and short breaks right in front of the curtain closing sometimes in the course of the action, with music or not. There is an abundance of plastic numbers - sometimes meaningful (the revenge dance of Anna-Alexandra Ursulyak, who draws her weak-willed ex-fiancé, quietly sitting on a chair, into aggressive whirling), sometimes just for the sake of increasing energy. In the first act, the dramatic action is now and then interrupted by some kind of techno, or hip-hop, under which the actors move in a torn drawing. The entire unhurried beginning of the second act is filled with wordless, beautiful and soothing numbers, apparently designed to create a special atmosphere.

As often happens in Butusov's performances, the actors try on various masks on their characters, marked with some catchy external sign: white makeup, disheveled red hair mark both social status and state of mind. There are many transformations, overflows, contrary to Brecht's clear character system: a discharged prostitute in a wig with white curls turns into Anna, at some point Alexandra Ursulyak and Timofey Tribuntsev change clothes, as if entangling in their own, including gender roles ... Murk of Alexander Matrosov in the first act is an absurd, in a valet's costume, a real limiter who has crawled into "respectable people" on a rear apron. In the second - a white clown, lonely burying his child. True, this plug-in sketch, too sentimental, literally forcing the viewer to sympathize, seems like an overly categorical, not subtle device.

The heroes of the play have a chance to be themselves only in exposure, since the body is more truthful than words. The thin, unprepossessing, almost pitiful hero of Timofey Tribuntsev, stripped down to his underpants in front of luxurious freaks in wigs, bows, tuxedos and dresses with trains, already by this bold insecurity is as if doomed to victory.

As it happens in Butusov's performances (it's generally awkward to start each paragraph with the same phrase, but Drums in the Night is in many ways a digest of the director's favorite techniques), mental and sensual reality are no less tangible than actual reality. According to the plot, Andreas has not yet returned from Africa, but Tribuntsev's hero in a wedding dress, with pink smudges, is on the stage from the very beginning, and everything that Anna does or says, she does taking into account his presence in the house. However, the "ghost" itself does not refrain from commenting, imparting a comic reflection to the dramatic content. In this, in addition to theatrical paint, there is also a key to understanding the state of Andreas, whose existence is constantly being questioned, whose life takes place somewhere on the border with oblivion, bringing death.

Despite the dense fabric of the play, flaunting the inventiveness and brilliance of the numbers, despite the aggressive musical and plastic form, which somewhat oppresses both the word and philosophy, and the socio-political overtones of the play, "Drums in the Night" seem to push the heroes of the play onto the stage: the three suffering people who, unlike their entourage - parents, patrons of the fashionable Piccadilly bar and democratic pub with cisterns and drums instead of tables - are allowed complexity, volume is allowed. Unmasked situation allowed. Alexandra Ursulyak has a particularly difficult time: the will and attraction of her heroine are played primarily in plasticity, pauses, and gestures. Timofey Tribuntsev, an actor of Butusov in the era of "Satyricon", is both the main opponent and the center of the performance. His very figure, which does not suit favorable postures, his dull, non-musical voice, everyday intonation that does not recognize imagination and precision - all this seems to be in opposition to this bright, complex world, and it is this opposition that creates tension. A prematurely mourned groom, an annoying hindrance to life somehow settled down, a soldier with a bandaged head and bloody spots instead of eyes, a naked African native smeared with wax with a drum - Tribuntsev's hero quickly changes masks in order to be himself for a while and hide again under a new disguise.

In Butusov's play, there is no that harsh social opposition that is outlined in Brecht's text: the rivalry between the soldier and the manufacturer who profited from the war, everything here is concentrated in the intimate sphere and decided lyrically. Alexander Matrosov, remembered from the previous performance of Butusov as a water carrier, shows his Murka as a character no less significant than his opponent. His melancholy and rage break through the mask of the caricatured Lopakhin. It seems that everyone is against him: the ridiculous white gloves, and the butterfly, and patent shoes, and the fussy bravado that makes you go to Piccadilly on a troubled night, and that excitement from his own success, which he cannot hide, and the money with which he showers the unfortunate soldier who has returned from the afterlife. But there is another thing - the despair with which Murk proves, first of all, to himself that he has the right to happiness, that fear that fetters his movements and that trustfulness that does not fit with the image of the master of life, with which he clings to the bride and confesses to her in their own weakness. Murk is confused, and this disorientation becomes his indulgence.

In "Drums in the Night" there is also a play within a play, and a newsreel with footage of the defeated Berlin and the erection of the Berlin Wall, from which the hair stands on end - however, this document is so self-sufficient that it risks overturning the world created on stage. The play, albeit bizarre, with the help of a whole palette of non-obvious associations, but still retelling the play, enters into polemics with the text at the very end. Brecht's hero, lost his head from a successful outcome, threw the revolution and strove home - this short, ironic, but sympathetic vignette in Butusov's performance turns into a full-fledged, detailed scene. Andreas, somehow sharply aged, in a plaid jacket one size larger, in heavy-rimmed glasses, fiddles with a kettle, waters a flower in a pot, sits down in front of the TV. Nearby, on the armrest, is a well-groomed, modern-dressed Anna, on the other side - another woman, a little blonde. All three of them with this self-confident provincial way of life are rather unpleasant. And suddenly the play, which for three hours seemed to be an expensive, high-class and, undoubtedly, bourgeois show, made in a bourgeois theater for a bourgeois audience, turns into an anti-bourgeois, anti-mining statement. Whether to believe the ending or everything else is already a matter of perception.

Novaya Gazeta, November 28, 2016

Elena Dyakova

Mass grave as a Mobius strip

For whom is Yuri Butusov's "Drums in the Night" thundering?

Yuri Butusov put out one of his best performances at the Pushkin Theater. For me, Drums in the Night is both fiercer and more elegant than Butusov's The Kind Man from Cezuan, which thundered on this stage in 2013.

A black-skinned, red-lipped monster in rags grimaces among a clean audience in tuxedos, tailcoats and silks. Among the white lamps, crimson cocktails, the superstition of illuminated advertisements, the raucous swings of 1919. A nimble, skinny, unscrewed monster reads Brecht's "Ballad of a Dead Soldier" with a delay, spits in the guests' faces with lines about the "second mobilization" of the dead heroes to save the fatherland dress coats).

It is Kragler, the hero of the First World War, who came for his fiancee at her engagement to another. And what is dark, like a rotten banana, the shirt has decayed? So he lay in the grave for three years ...

Drums in the Night is an early, half-forgotten play by Brecht. 1919 year. The war lost by Germany, the collapse of the empire, the loss of territories, landslide inflation and shame. However, there are also new trends, new freedoms: Murk (Alexander Matrosov) got rich quickly (and on what he won’t say), yesterday a half-starved guy from the outskirts. The tuxedo cracks on his shoulders, satiety tugged at his features: Murk is the master of "Weimar" Germany. For the time being.

Everyone is dancing - while they are nearby, on the fashionable Friedrich Strasse, they shoot. Everyone is ready to change sex: it's more fun. The truly German mother of the family, Frau Balicke (Ivan Litvinenko), is now sporting an ambiguous but fashionable "boy-like" outfit - and a tailcoat pair bursts on her virtuous hips, the bulwark of a collapsed empire. The journalist Babush (Vera Voronkova) and the young waiter Manke (Anastasia Lebedeva), respectable bartenders and prostitutes in brocade with a cut, the orchestra of the Otechestvo cafe burn through the horror of the present amid shouts of “revolution in newspaper quarters”. Red-hot white balls of lamps descend into the restaurant hall: set designer Alexander Shishkin has created an excellent metaphor for "fire from heaven", elegantly descending on Sodom.

But what a pity this Sodom, Berlin-1919, hastily swallowing its scarlet cocktails!

All here are the clowns of the traveling troupe. And all of them are frivolous, easy to tears and verses, sympathetic to their neighbors, blown by the wind, enchanted by jazz ... living people.

What a quarter of a century, what a dead loop of time, what a new war and what kind of fire from the sky in front of this swinging public - Brecht guessed in 1919. And we know.

Butusov's performance is layered with chronicles: Friedrich Strasse shines with window lights (and the unemployed of the 1920s gaze gloomily in them), Friedrich Strasse lies in ruins in 1945, a Berlin Wall is being erected along a fashionable street ... But it is being demolished, the revived street is shining with lights 2010s - again in full glamor and chocolate. What will happen next?

The main drive to "Drums in the Night" by Butusov is given by a triangle of heroes: Murk, the master of post-war life, and the rejected fiancé - soldier Kragler (Timofey Tribuntsev), who rose from an unmarked grave to spit in the faces of the survivors and take away his woman, and Anna herself (Alexandra Ursulyak) - a war widow in fishnet stockings, Columbine in a catchy silent movie make-up.

This trio - Harlequin with a strong back of the head, Columbine of the "Merry Twenties" and the resurrected Pierrot in a shroud instead of a hoodie - plays great. Alexandra Ursulyak received the Golden Mask -2014 for the role of Shen Te in The Good Man from Sesuan, Alexander Matrosov played Vodonos well in The Good Man ... "(Both performances - theater" Satyricon "). But it was in "Drums in the Night" that they ... played out, you can't put it another way. They tore off the rags of restraint, entered the rights of the "first plots", into the disastrous buffoonery of the commedia dell'arte between the two wars.

The three actors have finally found complete freedom. And it suits them!

"A dead soldier has come for a bride" is a cross-cutting plot of German culture. From medieval ballads to the painting of the genius Austrian Egon Schiele "Death and the Virgin" (1915), where a gassed soldier embraces a bony patriot on the breastwork of a trench. Schiele is a favorite student of Klimt (their painting differs sharply and terribly, like the gilded 1900s and the First World War). Schiele died at the age of 28 in Vienna-1918. From the "Spaniard" who mowed half-starved Europe. He died shortly after his pregnant wife, whom he courted when she took to her bed (albeit decadent, blah ... destroyer of morality).

It seems: the shadow of his painting lies on "Drums in the Night". And Kragler - Tribuntsev and Anna - Ursulyak with their precise, nervous, disastrous plasticity are similar to his characters.

Brecht and Butusov are more merciful to their heroes than 1918 to Schiele and his wife. Decaying Cragler is resurrected. Hugs pregnant Anna. Puts on a new jacket. Here he stands in the foreground, endlessly, according to circus technology, pouring water from a battered, forever smoked Soviet teapot into an elegant Art Deco coffee pot ...

And here Brecht's play suddenly shifts to another time and to another country. Because ... isn't that what we've been doing here for twenty years? Firmly believing that the water will be different in a polished antique coffee pot. And its owners are different.

Gracious Cragler, in a new white shirt, drinks coffee. Watering ficus. Kisses his wife. Turns on a flat-screen TV ... from there crawls, menacingly swelling with a full-length video on the backdrop of the stage, a new military chronicle ...

And any time after the war turns out to be the time before the war for the poor fellow.

And you can watch "Drums in the Night" as a stylish love story of the "Jazz Age".

Or you can - as a parable about the chill with which you re-read Brecht today.

Culture, 9 December 2016

Elena Fedorenko

Permitted drummers

A little-known play by Bertolt Brecht was staged at the Theater named after A.S. Pushkin.

Brecht wrote Drums in the Night when he was 20 years old. In his mature years he renounced her and did not even want to include it in his collection of early works. The original name "Spartacus" - a paraphrase to the naming of a Marxist group led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - was not accidental: the young Brecht was worried about the social movement, he participated in the German November Revolution of 1918, but quickly lost interest in politics. So in a sense, Drums in the Night is based on an autobiographical theme.

The story is simple. Andreas Kragler returned from the war to his girlfriend at the moment when she announced her consent to marry another. The offended does not take revenge, but in despair goes to the riot-ridden streets. Anna, that is the name of the heroine, finds Andreas, and he immediately ceases to worry about everything that has nothing to do with the family hearth. He contrasts the ideas of struggle with “bed and reproduction”. For such a petty-bourgeois apostasy, Brecht was ashamed of his early opus.

Petersburg resident Yuri Butusov, a master of theatrical courage, is addressing Brecht for the third time. A director from an endangered breed of visionaries, he gets turned on when plot and intrigue give the opportunity to manifest unbridled stage fads.

The beginning of the performance. The head of the family, Karl Balike (Alexei Rakhmanov), with a naked torso, stained with blood (cut himself while shaving), and his wife Amalia (Ivan Litvinenko), with a deathly white face and a scythe thrown over his chest, dream of marrying their daughter Anna for an enterprising Murka. Young heroes: she, who looks like a puppet, and he, dressed as a maitre d ', is next to him. The bridegroom who disappeared four years ago is often remembered and called a decomposed corpse, a dead man. But the “corpse” is among them, sitting in the center, in a rumpled ballet tunic, reminiscent of a stale wedding dress. Inserts remarks, starts a general dance. He has not yet returned, but is already present in the house with a shadow or a vision. The director's metaphor, for all its illogicality, is simple: memory, which does not allow one to part with the past. Does everyone see the "ghost" or only Anna, beating him, bandaging his head and drawing blood over the features of his unforgotten face over a bandaged mask? Solving the associative array of a director and an artist (Alexander Shishkin is also an inventor and a magician who knows how to attack the audience with vivid visual images) is a separate pleasure. So, in the scene "Flight of the Valkyrie" the characters move in rapid speed, substituting their clothes for the wind-fan flows, and suddenly freeze, struck out of nowhere by the eternal peace that has covered them. In the auditorium - dumbfounded. When a good couple of hundred luminous balls descend on the stage, it becomes sad and bitter: the very image of magical beauty seems so fleeting and untimely that it descended on people burnt by the era.

In "Drums in the Night", the director is concerned with a world that has gone wild and has lost faith in the future, a terrible destruction of human behavior and psyche. On the stage are those who are being devoured by the molokh of history: impersonal people with love and happiness taken away. Women play men, men play women, in which there are no perversions and slippery hints. The world just turned upside down. The shell-shocked people, experiencing global national humiliation (in fact, this was the case in Germany after the defeat in the First World War), turns into a collection of freaks, soulless mechanisms, deprived of sex.

War, revolution, death, epidemics - everything is somewhere out there, in the distance. The action, sealed by a rigid directorial framework, unfolds in the form of a cabaret with an endless stream of music. Heroes change masks, writhing like buffoonery jesters and circus clowns. Whitewashed faces, glued on mustaches, pulled-on wigs, red nose balls. The dance of death, a feast during the plague, visions akin to the mystical horrors of Bosch and Goya.

The stage mirror around the perimeter is outlined by glowing spherical shades, which form a space for free actors. A dark box is open, sometimes a sign is dropped from above with the inscription - the designation of a place or action, several times they give a chronicle on the screen: the hungry eyes of people of the late 1910s, the defeated Berlin of the mid-40s, early 60s, where vigorous workers lay flat with smiles rows of bricks, and the fact that they are building the Berlin Wall is not immediately clear.

"Drums in the Night" is a performance of huge actors' expenses, almost everyone dances and almost always, they rapidly change faces, each has several characters. Friedrich Murk (Alexander Matrosov), the master of life, who made a fortune in the rear on military speculation, becomes an unhappy comedian and plays a sad number of farewells to his unborn child. Vera Voronkova is unusually good - both in sharp buffoon solos and in the role of the excited newspaperman Babush. You can't take your eyes off Sergei Kudryashov (a spicy androgynous prostitute in a scarlet dress and tousled hair) and Anastasia Lebedeva, a little entertainer who, loudly grazing, explains what is happening, changing moods with the skill of a magician.

For the role of Andreas Kragler, Timofey Tribuntsev was invited from "Satyricon", in whose artistic nature the nervous organic nature of buffoonery and the humility of a little man are bizarrely combined. His hero, already mourned and forgotten, appears in the second act naked, completely covered in ashes: a naked man, useless to anyone, on bare ground. Coins wild words from Brecht's "The Ballad of the Dead Soldier" - about the re-mobilization of dead soldiers. Anna returns to him, who has risen from the hell of war and captivity. Alexandra Ursulyak appears now as a cheeky and vulgar seductress, now as a nervous and suffering woman, transposing the line of a sharp and broken clown into the woeful dotted line of a widow's fate.

Joined Andreas and Anna prefer the quiet everyday life of the townsfolk to social rage. At the feet of the former soldier, who spoke in the words of Pasternak (“I want to go home, to the vastness of an apartment that makes me sad”), like a dog, the beloved sits down. The TV screen is dazzling with a "snowball", there is no picture. Boredom emanates from home comfort, Tribuntsev smiles into the audience: "What kind of ending did you expect?" Where is it, happiness? .. An incomplete ten from a large troupe, which is surprising, creates a dense and energetic performance that gives the impression of a crowded one. The inventive “Butusov's cabaret” closes with a freestyle drum roll. All nine actors deftly stamp their various instruments on the membranes. It turns out either the apotheosis of a rock festival, or a wild howl over the hopeless fate of Brechtian heroes.

Screen and stage, December 10, 2016

Olga Fuks

Of hopelessness little orchestra

The spirit of Brecht is felt everywhere. In Teatre.doc, the cycle "Brecht Readings" has begun, where lectures with tricky titles (like "Total Wrong According to Brecht") are held and zongs are sung. A company of strange people in headphones wanders around the Leningradsky railway station: stepping over the legs of those sitting, settling in the waiting room, suddenly taking off and starting to cut circles around the station, expelling a drunken passenger who suddenly wants to merge with this company. Those departing and waiting in bewilderment look at the amazing flock and pay almost no attention to the two young actors leading the burningly topical "Refugee Conversations" in this crowd - a Brechtian text practically unknown to the Russian audience. Just like "Drums in the Night" - a bastard play in the legacy of the playwright: he himself did not like it, and in the USSR it was not included in the academic five-volume edition.

“Here the struggle against the literary tradition worthy of oblivion almost led to oblivion of the real struggle - the social one,” Brecht reproached himself in the article “Rereading My First Plays”. Paraphrasing Pushkin's phrase about Tatiana, who “that's what she learned - took it, and got married”, the mature Brecht could not understand how his hero Kragler, who miraculously escaped from four-year African captivity, a soldier of the Weimar Republic, did not join the revolution: “this the soldier would either get his girlfriend back, or completely lose her, but in both cases he would remain in the revolution. " Kragler's decision to "turn his back on the revolution" and live a private life with his "spoiled" girlfriend Brecht calls "the most pathetic of all." Brecht admitted that he even wanted to throw this play out, but decided not to engage in falsification of history, leaving his “hero” (Brecht's quotes) the right to exist and relying on the consciousness of the viewer, who himself would guess to move from sympathy to antipathy.

However, not everyone shared his self-criticism with Bertolt Brecht. Thus, the Berlin critic Herbert Jering, having watched Drums in the Night (the first of Brecht's plays staged on stage), wrote him a start in life, claiming that Brecht gave Germany a new sound.

Needless to say, the 2016 viewer has much more complex feelings for the soldier Kraggler.

Yuri Butusov over the past several years has been literally saturated with Brecht: "Man = Man" based on the play "What is that soldier, what is this" at the Alexandrinsky Theater, "The Kind Man from Sesuan" on the stage of the Pushkin Theater, "Cabaret Brecht" at the Lensovet Theater (Muscovites saw it all on the same stage of the Pushkin Theater, whose bare brick wall so fits the style of Butusov's Brecht) and, finally, Drums in the Night - in the same place. Laura Pitskhelauri and Alexandra Ursulyak, Timofey Tribuntsev and Sergei Volkov and other adherent actors of Yuri Butusov live and work in different cities, but in his performances they seem to work together in one close-knit troupe, where everyone understands each other perfectly.

Soldiers are returning - from a vile, distant, senseless war. But profitable for those who stayed at home. The dealers are catching a wave - it's time to rebuild the workshop for the manufacture of boxes for artillery shells into the workshop for the production of baby carriages: it's time to bury your dead, concrete a place where memory sprouts can sprout, it's time to use what you have acquired and find widowed brides new grooms. But the past became obstinate: it got out of all the cracks and declared its rights. Soldiers who no one expected are returning - uncomfortable with their pretensions, hopes and damned questions. They return as a relapse of a fatal illness - they are about to sing a prayer of death around this world.

Andreas Kragler also returned - the “satirikonist” Timofey Tribuntsev is dressed more than strange: a wedding dress, worn shoes, in another scene he is smeared with soot, as if charred, - an embodied nightmare of the not outlived past, hastily swept as garbage under the carpet. The past requires retribution, and it cannot be otherwise. Yuri Butusov blurs the line between life and death: in his performance, the seal of carrion was imprinted on the living. The movements are uncoordinated, like those of skeletons. At regular intervals, the action explodes with energetic dances of death - a small orchestra accompanied by drums and hopelessness. It is as if some skillful manipulator is pumping an energy drink into the moribund soul of society. And, damn it, these dances are so incendiary that the audience is covered with a powerful wave. And in one of the scenes the whole company freezes in the pose of the gallows, quietly “swaying” to the creak of the rungs.

He was covered in blood like a butcher at work, the father of a bride passing over like a prize (Alexei Rakhmanov) - he shaved, saving the world, because cuts, unlike electricity, did not have to be paid. Mother (Ivan Litvinenko) got a scythe and a terrible grimace of a trans-vestite, a man who has completely lost his identity, will, and opinion.

“White top, black bottom” in the guise of a new groom, merchant Friedrich Murk (Alexander Matrosov), traces a tragic rift in the mind of this petty clerk. He worked so hard - patent leather shoes indicate that he has escaped from the circle prescribed for him by his birth, overcame one step of the social ladder. But his whitewashed face hardened with longing: his bride does not love him, his child cannot live, he is ridiculous in his attempt to be strong and impudent, and this damn rival in mud and rags, who has fallen on his head, carries some terrible truth that does not fit into consciousness. And along with fear comes resentment - I did not send you to the war, I worked, turned around, survived. I do not want to answer to you for what happened to you.

The bride of Anna Alexandra Ursulyak was first fabricated and dressed as if it was her, as in the poem "The Legend of the Dead Soldier", prepared for the parade after death. Gradually, the wild make-up disappears from her, and her eyes appear - tender, evil, guilty, sick. The child is so angry with the mother for having died, abandoned him. By the finale, only one black leotard remains on her - the overalls of the actor, on her face - a smile of peace: she managed to survive among the dead.

And one more role unexpectedly comes to the fore - the waiter Manke performed by Anastasia Lebedeva as a jeweler. The stepson of his time, Gavroche with slicked hair and grazing sounds, he / she brings in a cheerful chill of absurd sound and the very alienation, the absence of which Brecht lamented in the play in the aforementioned article.

And, finally, the main character - the soldier Kragler Timofey Tribuntsev, who returned to a country that had changed beyond recognition, to a bride who was going to marry another, to the frenzy of a new time, when the red lights of the Piccadilly bar wink at the red lights of shots: here they “eat” (remark), they die there. Thorny, sharp, cheerful in his despair, equally ready for rebellion and for obedience, accustomed to endure to the point of insensibility, and extremely accurate in his reactions, as if he was used to saving strength. In the finale, he will appear in a plaid jacket and coarse glasses, as if dressed up in the GDR some seventies.

This is not the first association with the GDR, which, it would seem, is not at all connected with the time of action of "Drums in the Night" (but when was Butusov guided by linear logic?). Berlin cannot be imagined without Brecht, but it is impossible to imagine it without the Berlin Wall, whose traces and scars are scattered throughout the city - there is a whole piece with a barbed wire, here is a remnant of masonry, and here is an exhibition of photographs, which invariably crowd the people. Closer to the finale, the macabre clownery is suddenly abruptly interrupted by a documentary interlude: a video of the construction of the Berlin Wall, one of those endlessly played in the Berlin Wall Museum. Cheerful workers are cheerfully laying brick after brick, a serious electrician busily winding the barbed wire. Confused people crumple on both sides of the wall. An elderly couple waves from the window to their children and small grandchildren - in the next frame, the house will “go blind,” brickwork will remain in place of the windows.

Kragler hugs his wife, turns on the floor lamp, sits down on the TV from the same time, waves of a spoiled signal run through it. The heroless philistine end of the story about a little man who climbed out of the millstones of History very shabby, exhaled and vowed never to participate in its bloody games again, looks rather ambiguous. It seems that one can be glad for the poor fellow despised by Brecht, but the anxiety remains - what kind of dreams of reason will this man in the street dream of when the old TV starts working again?

newspaper .ru, 23 December 2016

Pavel Rudnev

Between First and Second

Premiere of "Drums in the Night" by Yuri Butusov based on Bertolt Brecht at the Pushkin Theater

Yuri Butusov staged the anti-war Drums in the Night by Bertolt Brecht at the Pushkin Theater with the participation of Alexandra Ursulyak, Timofey Tribuntsev and other artists - and, as always, saturated his production with metaphors and references to modernity.

Author, hero and modernity

At creative meetings and master classes, director Yuri Butusov told the audience that he was amazed at one remark by Bertolt Brecht. She sounded laconic: "They eat". "How to play such a remark?" - Butusov asked philosophically. In the play "Drums in the Night" Butusov again suspended this question, simply letting this word down from the grate-bars on the ropes, unable to realize such a capacious metaphor. They "eat" here - this is the state of the world.

It is not enough to say that Butusov staged Brecht's play as an anti-war performance. Here it could not be otherwise: Bertolt Brecht got to observe how Germany, after the humiliation and losses of the First World War, was imprinted in the Second, and the writer, just like the hero of "Drums in the Night" Andreas Kragler, chooses the conscious path of pacifism. “I'd rather be a deserter than a real man,” as Brecht would later formulate when he decided to leave the country and fight Nazism from abroad.

But the play was written in 1919, thus, for Brecht, even before any appearance of German Nazism, the path of a deserter was obvious. Having learned the hard work in a hospital for the wounded, Brecht had the right to scoff at the political paternalistic slogans of a society that drives soldiers - instead of themselves - to a senseless slaughter, and then throws disfigured, shell-shocked and mentally crippled veterans to their fate. The smell of the trenches, apparently, is beautiful and forms a "real man", but the purulent, cadaverous smell of hospital wards easily sober up the militaristic romance.

Drums in the Night is a fire-fighting show. All of it, all of its three and a half hours, and especially the loud finale with frenzied heroes pounding drums, is built on the intonation of expectation and anxiety. We see video footage of destroyed Berlin, where not a single functioning building remained along the bend of the Spree River. Then we see no less eerie footage of the construction of the Berlin Wall, and now the wall itself moves from the backstage to the auditorium. And the inscription appears on the bricks: "The End."

The metaphor is more than straightforward: Russia in 2016 is a militarized country with the maximum polarization of society. She is ready to re-erect the iron curtain around herself, dooming herself to another round of isolation, forgetting what losses it is fraught with. Indeed, it is no coincidence that already in two performances of this Moscow season, the Berlin Wall appears as an obsessive metaphor: in Democracy after Michael Frain at the RAMT, director Alexei Borodin invites us to evaluate its collapse again as the most important event of the 20th century, towards which the world is so stubborn , walked long, hard. The paradox is that these performances appear precisely today, at a time when so many people around are convincing us that the most important event of the 20th century was the construction of the Wall.

But Butusov's performance is still largely not about the hero - the soldier Andreas Kraggler. It is about the state of society. With the curtain open, we see a perverse distorted world. Butusov says that before starting work on "Drums" he studied the work of the artist Egon Schiele, and therefore here we see the world in expressionist colors. Heroes who have lost their sexual nature, transgender people, with painted faces, flowing ink, faces periodically covered with blood. The Balike family says they fear the return of their daughter's fiancé from the front in Morocco. But the dead Andreas Kragler (Timofey Tribuntsev) is already here. He sits invisibly in an armchair and listens to what his acquaintances say about him. The corpse of a soldier is always with us and, according to the song of the same Brecht "The Legend of a Dead Soldier", can again be used for battle.

The world no longer has a sense of normality, normality: if a war is going on somewhere, a society that has not stopped this war cannot be normal. Society is guilty in any case, even if this war is "somewhere in Africa." Integrity does not exist in nature; it has died out as a class.

In his analysis of society, Brecht proceeds from a socialist position. It seethes, first of all, a deep disappointment in the consequences for Germany of losing the First World War and, at the same time, a deeply Marxist understanding that the ruling classes "establish" the truth. Seeing the devastated homeland in the post-war depression with the disabled, shell-shocked, desperate cripples, orphaned children prancing through the streets,

Bertolt Brecht also sees that the war for many who remained in the rear is simply a successful business. Slogans are for the enthusiastic and uncritical. For the practical and purposeful - enrichment, commerce. Society is interested in war, it is a tool for solving many issues. And while Kragler is rotting in his African swamp, Karl Balicke (Alexey Rakhmanov) and Friedrich Murk (Alexander Matrosov) agree not only about marriage and the pooling of capital, but also about a new deal, about how to rebuild their factory from military orders for the production of ammunition boxes for peaceful - production of baby carriages.

Essentially, Brecht in Drums in the Night, Butusov in the theater and playwright Natalya Vorozhbit, who wrote the play Sasha, Take Out the Trash in 2014 about a dead Ukrainian soldier - they all say the same thing: society needs only dead heroes ...

"What do you want, Kragler?" - they ask a soldier who has returned from the war. "You have fallen under the skating rink of history, you no longer have a face ... I have to pay for his exploits? .. You are a hero, and I am a hard worker," says the merchant Murk, who makes money from the war and is ready to use his bride Anna (Alexandra Ursulyak) to Kragler ...

Drama by Brecht and direction by Butusov

The viewer is accustomed to a certain authorial format of Yuri Butusov's direction. This is a frenzied drive of the most varied music, frantic dances, self-repetitions, tautological mise-en-scenes, dispersed literary text, influx of interludes in the form of poems (in "Drums" they also read both Brecht and Pasternak). The interaction of the viewer with the performance occurs more through energy exchange than through the logic of the narrative. Influential and in demand, adored by the audience, Yuri Butusov is so strong that he is trying to work in the style of the latest theater, to open the windows to the theater of the XXI century. Instead of the logical construction of the score of the play, Butusov proposes an unsystematic, organized chaos, not subjecting the staging technique to the laws of literary composition, offering the audience not serving the literary text, its illustration, but their own visions about it.

The problem of the performance "Drums in the Night" begins in the second act, where the exhaustion of the audience's attention - which is familiar to the audience of Butusov's performances - reaches its maximum. Before us is a short, fairly straightforward play and a huge, almost four-hour performance. And there is not enough content throughout its space. In the second act, here and there there are many scenes that can be called "stage rubbish". Remnants of previous interpretations, scraps of unfinished thoughts, scaffolding to the main director's idea, which they forgot to shoot.

Actor Alexander Dmitriev is almost wordlessly present on the stage in the form of either Saint Sebastian descended from the canvas, or Christ removed from the crucifixion. Can we apply this image to Butusov's utterance system? A grazing asexual waiter in an elegant performance by Anastasia Lebedeva, imitation of the broadcast director's voice, Timofei Tribuntsev forgetting the text, asking him to suggest it, and much more - these techniques really seem redundant, casting a fog on the initially clear author's statement. The thread of the stage narrative is lost, the performance is idling.

Post-dramatic theater (this controversial term can be applied to Butusov) works, it seems, only as a commentary on already existing meanings. But when this is commenting on empty content, it gets tiresome - the comment cannot become an independent value. In the second act, we really lack the meaningfulness of the stage time - and in fact the second act adds to the already voiced ideas only the video of Berlin and the Berlin Wall, and this is more of an ornament and inlay than a stage performance as such.

Bertolt Brecht strove for unconditional clarity, obviousness, and straightforwardness of theatrical expression. As a publicist and rhetorician, he often even begins to "explain the words": if you have not realized my artistic image, then in the zongs or the author's performance, the artists will decipher us, unpack any metaphor.

The viewer must clearly understand everything, realize, get involved in the problematic. It is also no coincidence that Brecht's talk about the revival in the 20th century of "instructive plays" - the genre of the Enlightenment. Clarity and transparency are essential when Brecht's art becomes a journalistic weapon in anti-war art. Brecht's art is a debate, where precise formulations and counterarguments, transparent articulation, words are like nails, like a brand are important. Yuri Butusov in this performance (and this was not the case either in "Cabaret Brecht" or in "The Good Man from Cezuan") obscures, cloudes his own statement. It would be very nice in some other plot, in the end this is the artist's goal - to charm, to deceive our consciousness. But it is here, in "Drums", that the degree of civic utterance is lost due to the vagueness of meaning, as if the original desire for clarity in the process of staging was clouded with doubt.

Kommersant, December 26, 2016

Brecht with variations

"Drums in the Night" at the Pushkin Theater

At the Moscow Pushkin Theater, director Yuri Butusov staged Bertolt Brecht's early play Drums in the Night. By ROMAN DOLZHANSKY.

Yuri Butusov again staged Brecht on the stage of the Pushkin Theater - "Drums in the Night" form a Brechtian dilogy together with the "Good Man from Sesuan", which appeared not so long ago. For a theater making a soft but sensitive turn from an absolutely democratic repertoire to a serious one, the event is important, emphasizing the non-coincidence of the first Brecht. This time, Yuri Butusov took a less well-known, early play, so he did not have to enter into a dialogue with the history of its interpretations. It is time, however, to talk about the dialogues within the director's own Brechtian: he staged the great German playwright not only in Moscow, but also at the Lensovet Theater in St. Petersburg.

If we resort to thematic classification, then "Drums in the Night" is an anti-war performance, which means that it is relevant today. In an interview, the director said that in his work he was inspired by the aesthetics of expressionism. In the materials about Brecht, you can read that the author in "Drums ..." argued with expressionism. And yet, the contradictions with the author, who adhered to rational class positions, which were obvious in The Kind Man from Cezuan, are not so significant in the new play - the author in his youth was thrown from one idea to another, and the thought of the horror of war in a play written in 1919, is deducted from the plot itself. The soldier Kragler, who comes from the front, has been considered dead by everyone for several years, but he comes from the war just when his ex-fiancée is about to marry another.

The audience, however, loves Yuri Butusov's performances not for the plots, but for what is commonly called theatricality, not for the subtle elaboration of dialogues or individual scenes, but for the sharpness and unpredictability of the “cut sheets” of the performance; and also - for the fascination and non-triviality of playlists: every now and then you see how young people at the performance pull their hand to the stage with a smartphone on which the Shazam application is turned on - to recognize this or that composition in order to enjoy it later. Drums in the Night characters are like itinerant comedians caught off guard by sudden catastrophe. Artist Alexander Shishkin decorated the stage portal with colored lights, but the brighter they burn, the more eerie what they frame seems to be. The characters can be considered ghosts, the dead, and the "revived" soldier Kragler, one might say, falls not into this world, but into the other world. One of the most powerful scenes of the play is when all the characters are swaying regularly, not like puppets, not like the bodies of those hanged, in a strong wind.

A short play by Brecht is played in the first act of the play. But Yuri Butusov, who knows how to roll out any texts in time, like an experienced hostess knows how to bring the dough to the thickness of a transparent sheet, creates the second action - it consists of variations, fantasies, unfinished sketches, intentional repetitions, like director's drafts, which are a pity to part with .. It is a theater that is infinitely variable, it can never end or end anywhere. In this case, the actors justify the randomness of the director's handwriting. There are several excellent acting works in the play - first of all, by Alexandra Ursulyak and Alexander Matrosov, who found a common language with the director in "The Good Man ...". But here Timofey Tribuntsev is the strongest in the role of Kragler - mobile, like an unknown animal, dangerous, like ball lightning, changeable, like an actor's nature itself. Whether he dances on the stage naked, smeared with black paint, or crawls, like a creature of unknown origin, on the piano, or, briskly, scolds the whole world - the horror of a person who has become a victim of time, of being as such, lives in him.

Yuri Butusov, however, does not avoid historical allusions. The disintegration of the world in "Drums in the Night" is not only, so to speak, an aesthetic phenomenon, but also a terrible reality of society. Two times documentary footage appears on the video screen: the first fragment is Berlin destroyed after the end of the Second World War with empty boxes of buildings on the embankments of the Spree, the second is the construction of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s. People stand in the streets and with bewildered smiles watch as an ugly wall of huge blocks is being erected in the middle of the roadway, and windows are laid in the residential buildings on the border. And while the workers flop the mortar and somehow fix the bricks, the residents wave to each other before suddenly leaving. The technique, to be sure, is strong, but dangerous - such documentary films almost always turn out to be stronger than any theater.

Bertolt Brecht

Drums in the night

Bertolt Brecht. Trommeln in der Nacht. Translated by Greenem Rathaus.

Characters

Andreas Kragler.

Anna Balike.

Karl Balicke, her father.

Amalia Balike, her mother.

Friedrich Murk, her fiancé.

Babush, journalist.

Two men.

Glubb, the owner of the pub.

Manke, the waiter from the Piccadilly bar.

Manke nicknamed "Raisin Lover", his brother, the waiter in the pub Glubba.

Drunk brunette.

Bultrotter, the peddler of newspapers.

Worker.

Laar, a peasant.

August, prostitute.

Maria, prostitute.

Maid.

Newspaper saleswoman.

The Manke brothers are played by the same actor.

The comedy takes place on a November night, from evening to morning twilight.

The first act. Africa

Apartment Balike

A dark room with muslin curtains. Evening.

Balike (shaves by the window). For four years now, not a word has been heard about him. Now he will not return. Times are fiendishly unreliable. Every man is worth its weight in gold today. Two years ago I would have given them a parental blessing, but your damned sentimentality then foolishly my head. But now I have to sneeze at all this.

Mrs Balike (looks at the photograph of Kragler in artillery uniform on the wall). He was such a good person. With such a childlike soul.

Balike... Now he's rotted in the ground.

Mrs Balike... What if he comes back?

Balike... No one has ever returned from paradise.

Mrs Balike... By the armies of heaven, Anna will drown herself then!

Balike... Since she says so, she's just a goose, and I've never heard of a goose drowning itself.

Mrs Balike... For some reason, she's sick all the time.

Balike... She doesn't need to eat so many berries and herring. This Murk is a glorious fellow, we have to thank God on our knees for him.

Mrs Balike... Well, he makes good money. But where is he to Kragler! I just want to cry.

Balike... Before this corpse ?! I tell you: now or never! Is she waiting for the Pope? Or does she need ebony? I've had enough of this capital.

Mrs Balike... And if he returns, this corpse, which now, in your opinion, is already rotting in the ground, will return from heaven or from hell: “Hello. I am Kragler! " - who will then announce to him that he is a corpse, and his girl lies with another in bed?

Balike... I'll tell him myself! Now tell her that I've had enough, and let them play the wedding march, and that she's marrying Murka. If I tell her, she will drown us in tears. Now please turn on the light.

Mrs Balike... I'll get the patch. Without light, you will cut yourself like this every time ...

Balike... Light is expensive, but I don't pay for a cut. ( Screams to another room). Anna!

Anna (in the door). What's the matter with you, father?

Balike... Kindly listen to your mother and don't you dare whimper on such a festive day!

Mrs Balike... Come here, Anna! Father says you are so pale, as if you do not sleep at all at night.

Anna... What are you, I'm sleeping.

Mrs Balike... Think for yourself, this cannot go on forever. He will never return. ( Lights the candles).

Balike... Again she has eyes like a crocodile!

Mrs Balike... Of course, it was not easy for you, and he was a good man, but now he is already dead!

Balike... Now the worms are eating it!

Mrs Balike... Charles! But Murk loves you, he is a hard-working fellow, and he, of course, will go far!

Balike... That's it!

Mrs Balike... And you, therefore, agree, and with God!

Balike... And don't give us an opera!

Mrs Balike... You, therefore, with God, marry him!

Balike (furiously sticking plaster). Give you thunder, do you think you can play cat and mouse with guys? Yes or no! And there is no need to nod at God!

The play "Drums in the Night"

The performance, performed in the style of a cabaret, captures the audience from the first minutes. The master of irrepressible spectacles made a small play by the German playwright in two acts, so the audience can take a breath during the intermission. Essentially, the actors play the play in the first act. In the second act, the production is full of wordless and enchanting moments, which are probably designed to create a special atmosphere.

The play "Drums in the Night" at the Pushkin Theater

The performance "Drums in the Night" combines the best traditions of the Chamber Theater with the current language of contemporary theatrical art. The production, on which the eminent director Yuri Butusov worked, turned out to be very entertaining, bright and dynamic. The play is based on a little-known work by the renowned German playwright Bertold Brecht.

The performance is intended only for an adult audience, so for a family viewing it is better to choose another option.

About the production of "Drums in the Night"

The story, which the author of the play considered a failure, Butusov managed to turn into an amazing theatrical performance to the depths of his soul. The stage space turns into a cabaret. People in colorful suits froze in different poses. In the center of the plot is the soldier Andreas Kragler. And now colorful decorations flash in front of us, artists try on new images and all this is accompanied by cheerful melodies of a typical cabaret. Throughout the entire stage performance, the sound of drums is clearly audible, the voice of which sounds either too alarming or bravura.

The performance "Drums in the Night" is a virtuoso acting game, interesting directorial finds, an amazing stage and musical setting, it is a spectacular production for all times.

About the director

One of the best theater directors in Russia. Everything that Yuri Butusov's hand touches takes on a second life and shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow. The artistic director of the Lensovet Theater appeals to the imagination of the viewer, creates a certain zone of discomfort for him in order to step into the unknown and experience incredible emotions and unforgettable impressions.

Glory to the eminent director came back in the mid-90s, when, as a student of the St. Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts, he staged the play Waiting for Godot. This work was highly appreciated by critics and the jury and was awarded two Golden Masks at once.

Today, behind Butusov's shoulders, there is a huge number of successful performances that are staged on the best domestic and world stages. On the stage of the theater. Pushkin, one can contemplate Brecht's "The Kind Man from Sesuan", who was awarded the Stanislavsky Prize and two "Golden Masks".

How to buy tickets for the performance "Drums in the Night"

Drums in the Night tickets are the best gift for any theater-goer in the country. This colorful performance will not leave you indifferent, and in order to see it, you need to order counter tickets in one of the proposed ways: online, by phone or at the theater box office. The first two options are the simplest and most convenient ones, because you will become the happy owner of a ticket, bypassing long lines and tiring trips. Cooperating with our agency, you make a purchase without leaving your home and receive your order within 2-3 hours from the moment of its confirmation.

Our advantages:

• We have been working since 2006 and value each of our clients, providing prompt delivery, high level of service and an individual approach.
• Own courier service in Moscow and St. Petersburg. If you are a resident of one of these cities, then get your order absolutely free!
• We offer free assistance and a personal consultant who will select the best seats, taking into account all your wishes.
• Nice interface, prompt feedback, competent employees.
• Discounts for companies from 10 people. Becoming a regular customer of our agency, you get the opportunity to order counter-cars at a reduced cost.

The performance "Drums in the Night" 2019 at the Pushkin Theater will give you a fireworks display of emotions, so buy your tickets right now and have time to take the best seats!

I never thought that I would ever see this play on stage after Ulanbek Bayaliev's performance at the Et cetera theater ten years ago:

The other day Ulanbek and I ran into a run-through in the Vakhtangov theater, in view of the upcoming Butusov premiere, we recalled his long-standing work that did not last long in the repertoire, and agreed that, in addition to the objective shortcomings inherent in Brecht's early (second) play, as well as the problems of the actual production and the performances, "Drums in the Night" at that moment came at the wrong time, they were a little ahead of him - as a result they missed the mark. On the other hand, and here I objected to Ulanbek, three or four years ago, the overly topical relevance of this play would certainly have been felt as speculative. But if, in principle, she deserves to intensify attention to her, then now, right now.

In general, Butusov, the most unpredictable director I know of, has such a peculiar relationship with drama that he often rehearses "Three Sisters" - and it turns out "Othello", takes on Vampilov's "Duck Hunt" - and Bulgakov's "Run" comes out ... and Brecht for Butusov, along with Shakespeare and Chekhov, is the most beloved author, at least judging by the frequency of the director's reference to his work: Cezuan "at the theater. Pushkin, "Cabaret Brecht" at the theater. Lensoveta - this is just what I saw myself and "live", well, and to the heap I once managed to look at GITIS Brecht "test" of sophomore Zhenovach, where Butusov also taught. At the same time, the Brecht-Butus link is paradoxical, because it would seem that Butusov's theater is incompatible - spontaneous, sensual, irrational, transmitting not thought, but energy, and Brecht's drama with its schematism, straightforward (I would say, vulgar) sociality, often reaching to open didactics, with the musty ideology of the Marxist, finally. In fact, oddly enough, it is Brecht's schematic plots and characters that are sometimes perfect for Butusov to fill with their own emotions from the director.

On the stage of the Pushkin Theater - again, in essence, as during the spring tour of the Theater. Lensovet, only now on a stationary basis, "Cabaret Brecht" furnishings: illuminated metal structures, musical instruments (including, of course, a big drum - sometimes splashing with "blood"!), Men in women's dresses, women in men's suits, clown make-up and multi-colored wigs , circus pantomime, pop gags and stand-up interactive, Jesus Christ and Charlie Chaplin, a song about Paris from Piaf's repertoire, "The priest had a dog ..." and wild dances. But in "Cabaret" Butusov gave a cut of Brecht's political statements and biographical information connected with him, sprinkling them with the most popular hits of his most popular plays. Here, the play is far from the most famous (except for Bayaliev, no one actually staged it in Moscow before Butusov - but here they also use an exclusive translation by Yegor Peregudov), and there are no zongs (not counting Mekki's aria, A knife from "Threepenny Opera" against the background of a curtain between acts 4 and 5 of the play), although there is enough musical eccentricity and synchrobuffonade - but against the expectation, not ecstatic dance numbers define the image of the performance, especially after the intermission.

In that Gitis "Brecht" test of the course with which Butusov worked as a teacher, I first of all remember the chorus from "Mother Courage", already a very mature, late play by the playwright, with the refrain "a soldier goes to war, he must hurry." For Brecht, war is one of the main categories of his artistic world, including class war and gender war, but also war in the truest sense of the word. The hero of "Drums in the Night, Andreas Kragler, disappeared somewhere for four military years, without giving any news of himself. He was considered dead, the bride was tired of waiting and is ready to marry another. But then a" mummy "appears, a" living dead "falls on a holiday of life - Butusov's already crude Brechtian metaphor is presented literally, visually, and even with the involvement of Pasternak's poetic text ("I want to go home, to the vastness of the Apartment, which makes me sad ...") and few people could embody the "return of the living dead" at the same time as subtle and powerful as Timofey Tribuntsev, who worked a lot with YN, beginning, it seems, from the unforgettable “Macbeth” by Ionesco in “Satyricon.” Inside the ensemble of actors, the center of which is Tribuntsev, a kind of trio is formed: Alexandra Ursulyak (Anna) and Alexander Matrosov (Friedrich) is also not the first time collaborating with Butusov, they play the main roles in his "The Good Man from Cezuan." Among the travesty characters, Mari-Sergei Kudryashov and Manke-Anast stand out Asia Lebedeva (just as the director united all the "gods" in "The Good Man" in her, here instead of two Manke brothers, Butusov has one, brilliantly made by Lebedeva as an actor, and the function of this androgynous figure in the play is special, something like the manager of the cabaret, he comments on what is happening, and addresses the public, and at the same time contacts the rest of the characters).

According to the plot, the return of Andreas coincides not only with the preparation of his bride Anna for the wedding with Frederick, but also with the social-democratic ("Spartak") rebellion, to which the "resurrected" from despair was already completely adhered to - yes, he preferred a quiet family haven and therefore , according to the Marxist Brecht, "died" again, now finally. But at Butusov, somewhere far away, the roar of cannonade is heard, someone is looking death in the face (who is shooting - are they really red? Maybe already brown? Is there a big difference?), And on stage the "dance macabre" cabaret, pretend, continues. In the first act, which united two Brechtian acts, the accents are completely shifted to lyrical, even melodramatic motives, and here "Drums in the Night" is forced to recall not so much Butusov's previous experiments with Brecht, but his romantic one, which grew out of a student performance and entered the repertoire theater named after Mayakovsky's play "Liebe. Schiller" based on Schiller's "Treachery and Love". "Turn around in the march" - and in the end "the rams go and beat the drums", as usual. One gets the impression that Butusov's drums beat out the rhythm not of a revolutionary marching rhythm, but of the heartbeat, and the director wants to tell not about revolution and reaction, but about love and deceit, with an emphasis on a banal love triangle, albeit presented with an eccentric brightness inherent in Butusov's theater.

However, the second act is very different from the first, not so much in style as in mood, message. And here Brechtian satire partially gains a place for itself in the stage action, in the decision of characters. (I noticed that many people like the first act, but not the second, and vice versa, only the second, but not the first - and this is in the "premiere", approximately half-and-half "professional" and "fan" hall, which is obviously well disposed towards the performance) ... "When they shoot, you can run away, but you can not run away. Save the one you love ... You loved ..." - bourgeois demagoguery sounds more convincing, but hardly more honest than revolutionary demagoguery. He had no doubts that for Butusov, justifying the hero of the play through the notorious "family values" would be not just unacceptable - it would be of little interest. And of course, Kragler performed by Tribuntsev is more and more a satirical, comic character: a pantomimic scene in the finale is superbly invented, where Kragler pours water from a teapot into a coffee pot for a long time, from a coffee pot, sipping through a spout, watering a flower in a pot before sitting down before the "box". But at the same time, he is also a victim of circumstances that are stronger than a single person. Andreas's dances with jumping on the piano lid (!) In which the mother gave birth, not counting the black paint with which the whole body is smeared (a sarcastic reminder of his stay in Africa) socks on his feet and a drum on his belt - if not semantic, then emotional (and this is always more important for Butusov!) is the culmination of the second act, which contains the shortened last three acts of the play. Visually, the most spectacular episode - with light bulbs of various sizes descending on wires, when the characters find themselves for a short period as if among the stellar placers - such a short-term illusion arises. And the ending with his wife, petting a dog at his feet, in front of the TV - this is already life without illusions, as it is.

But oddly enough, in the purely conventional, theatrical-cabaret space of the performance, where there is no hint of real historical events less than a hundred years ago, associated with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and "Spartacus Union", there is a place for "history" in the more familiar her understanding, including the documentary chronicle with shots of the first post-war bombed Berlin, then reports on the construction of the Berlin Wall. The play "Drums in the Night" was written immediately after the First World War; Butusov refers to the Second World War in newsreels. But anyone who has not yet shriveled up or decayed under the influence of Orthodoxy has in mind the following. I believe that the director also thinks in the same direction, the pathos of his new statement is not revolutionary, but anti-war. And in this sense, funny, the fresh "Drums in the Night" by Butusov, like Bayaliev's previous ones, are not addressed to the present or to the recent past, but to the near future, these, like those, run ahead, ahead - probably by the very a little, a little. The last thing that Butusov, having already dealt with the heroes of Brecht, addresses directly to the public - the image of an impending brick wall: home, which will become the border? prison? maybe immediately firing squad?

In short, in the morning a "skating rink" in Tuminas's "Oedipus" ran over me, in the evening a "wall" in Butusov's "Drums" (I sat in the front row both times) - isn't it too much in just one day? But it is noteworthy that the different directors, but still in many respects similar in their views on the theater, and on the person, and on the world order on a cosmic scale (no other director Rimas welcomes in Vakhtangovskoye with such sincere joy as YUN) from different initial positions, one on the material of an ancient Greek tragedy with a mythological plot, the other on the basis of a drama of the twentieth century written in hot pursuit of political events, they see practically the same prospects for man and mankind - both the immediate, short-term; and more distant. But both - and that they are also similar - are not limited to warning horror stories. So what, it would seem, is a hopeless denouement of "Drums ..." - both for a particular character and for the whole society - and at the end of the curtain the artists (very Brechtian, by the way) will come out and, before ritual bows, famously depict the now widespread on the stage there is a drum show, ironic, infectious, uplifting: so that the heart still beats, it does not stop! And it seems that Butusov is in no hurry to nail the reactionary philistine, who hastened to hide from a terrible storm in a married bed, to a pillory after Brecht, because he thinks in coordinates not political, not social, not even moral, but cosmic: he has a moral law - overhead, and the starry sky is within us.