All my life I have been asking myself the question: am I an optimist or a pessimist?
And when, on top of that, other questions come crashing down on you — the eternally Russian ones, such as: who is to blame? and what is to be done? — it becomes a little sad. Or very sad, depending on one’s luck. And then one day I was sitting at my desk, surrendering to sadness and reflecting on all the questions above, when suddenly the phone rang. A pleasant male voice asked whether I would like to design a production. It was the voice of the theatre itself, whose symbol, and for a long time my friend, became Albert Avkhodeev, director of the Volgograd Theatre for Young Audiences and, in my opinion, an absolutely brilliant director.
That is how, with a telephone call, theatre burst into my life.
I cannot swim, alas, alas, but they say there is a fail-safe method: people are thrown into the water, and they swim.
I was thrown into McDonagh. It was a very vivid and happy time. I reread the playwright, studied Ireland, watched films, listened to music, directed the gallery, headed a department at one university, taught at another, admitted new students and assessed the diploma works of old ones. There was no time to eat or sleep; time was catastrophically short — but what a time it was, even if it could never be fully grasped!
In the performance we had real water, spilling onto the shore from a sea-pool. And a boat. And an abandoned island inhabited by rough, impossible people with big, kind hearts. In short, that period and the work on “Billy” are among the happiest times of my life.
Then came the premiere, and I went out for the curtain call together with everyone else and could almost see my own star on the Walk of Fame. And it was happiness. The happiness of belonging to something previously unknown, beautiful, shared, and unfathomable.
On Monday, after the premiere had taken place, there was no longer any need to go to the theatre; the newly freed time could be distributed among other no less important matters. But I suddenly realized that time was not redistributing itself — it was curling into a funnel, forming a lacuna that nothing could fill. I went to the theatre after all. It was dark and empty on that day-off Monday; I quietly wandered across the stage and behind the scenes, when the assistant director’s voice rang out: “Aha, it’s got you,” or something of the sort.
It had.
