LENSOVET THEATRE
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

Duration 1 hour 30 minutes

Director Maxim Didenko

Premiere took place on 30 January 2014

CREATIVE TEAM

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Set designer Pavel Semchenko

Composer Ivan Kushnir

Light Designer Andrey Lebed

Sound Designer Mikhail Pavlovsky

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CAST

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Olga Babich
Sergey Volkov
Nikita Volkov
Yustina Vonschik
Anna Zhmaeva
Dmitry Karanevsky
Galina Kochetkova
Sofia Nikiforova
Mark Ovchinnikov
Rimma Sarkisian
Antonina Sonina
Veronika Favorskaya
Kirill Frolov
Maxim Khanzhov
Lidiya Shevchenko

The performance involves fragments of texts by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lilya Brik, Sergey Volkov and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

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Director Maxim Didenko and his students composed a performance about Mayakovsky, attempting to untangle the knot, in which the personality of the Poet is bound together with his beloved, friends, enemies, poetry, theatre and politics. The emotional starting point is found in these startling lines from the Prologue to Mayakovsky’s poem “The Backbone Flute”:

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I keep thinking more often:

should an ounce of lead,

As a period, at the end of my story go?

So, tonight,

not knowing what lies ahead,

I am giving a farewell show.

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The performance will constitute a tight fusion of physical, musical and visual expression. The bitter words by Marina Tsvetaeva can be taken as an epigraph to this work: “For twelve years in a row, Mayakovsky the man has been killing Mayakovsky the poet, and on the thirteenth year the poet got up and killed the man.”

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“In this kind of performance the actors get quite simplified tasks in the field of depicting human relations and psychological motives of behavior, but they require a very high level of technical skill. Performing a difficult rhythmic sound, plastic, musical score, playing with objects and interacting with each other is calculated by seconds. Here, the field of technology embraces lightness, and humor, and ability to convey instantly an emotional tone of the game or to show a mask. It is as if all the verbal text is translated into music, and the music is reproduced three times faster than the rhythm of ordinary life. On one hand, sharp and open theatricality has to do with the acting tradition of the Lensovet Theatre. And in this sense, the energy of futurism, post-dramatic performance has appeared in its very place, at least as a stage of the school. And then, with this level of technical skills, one can play whatever, even Chekhov. On the other hand, Didenko and Semchenko seem to have never before had to deal with such a powerful and unified team of stubbornly psychological “etude” actors, whose inevitable resistance to abstract theatrics should give unpredictable quality to this type of theater. After all, Mayakovsky, who was literally nailed to his deathbed at the end of the performance, still managed to run away…” (N. Pesochinsky, St. Petersburg Theatrical Journal, February 2014)