Musical and Drama Cossack Theatre, Volgograd
The most difficult thing in working on Heart of a Dog was
to find my own visual idea. The remarkable film by V. V. Bortko is too well known, loved and frequently quoted. But we had our own Vladimir Vladimirovich — Tikhonravov — with his own view and his own tasks. In working on the scenography, I rather quickly moved away from the object world of the stage, because it seemed interesting to look at that Bulgakovian era, and at Moscow in particular, through the work of an artist who lived and created at the same time. Vladimir Vladimirovich and I settled on Aristarkh Lentulov's painting Moscow (the painting is in the Tretyakov Gallery, so the theatre concluded an agreement with the Tretyakov, which granted us permission to use the image as a backdrop). In this way we immerse the viewer in a Cubo-Futurist atmosphere which, in our view, exists in dialectical unity with the text of Heart of a Dog. Everything is real and recognizable, yet at the same time impossible and phantasmagoric. The breaking of habitual life, the breaking of foundations and stereotypes, the search for new forms — in literature, in life, in art, in medicine. Professor Preobrazhensky's medical searches and experiments seem to take place in familiar Moscow, in his beloved apartment, but already under the conditions of “compaction,” the increased activity of the cultural commission of the housing association, the constant appearances of Comrade Shvonder and his companions, and so on and so forth. The cubic structure I proposed is intended at the same time to support the style of Lentulov's Moscow, to be used to denote the various functions of the professor's apartment rooms — so incomprehensible to the “housing comrades” — and to symbolize the breaking of the familiar object world and its replacement by new forms, the move away from the refined elegance of the patriarchal life of the Moscow intelligentsia toward the weighty, strongly built, chopped art of the revolutionary masses. A new life, in a new Moscow, in a new world, a new art. Shall we build our own new world?
E. Orlova
The Cossack Theatre staged a revolutionary comedy with elements of horror
The premiere of Heart of a Dog was a success the day before at the Volgograd Cossack Theatre.
On the Volgograd stage, Mikhail Bulgakov's story — read to shreds — found a new home: the story of how the medical luminary Professor Preobrazhensky performs surgery on an ordinary mongrel and turns it into a human being, Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov.
Director Vladimir Tikhonravov and production designer Elena Orlova offered a vivid visual image for the performance. The scenographic solution was based on the famous painting Moscow by the Russian avant-garde artist Aristarkh Lentulov, held in the Tretyakov Gallery. Such modernist artistic design is something entirely new for the Cossack Theatre, and very interesting.
The central element of the set is a greatly enlarged reproduction of Lentulov's Moscow, with its broken lines of walls, buildings and domes, with dense and resonant colors — an image that is emotionally powerful in itself and does not allow us to forget the collapse of foundations and the great fracture in Russia of the 1920s.
It was supplemented by movable cubic constructions with black and silver-mirrored sides. During the performance they were constantly moved and assembled like Lego, turning now into Professor Preobrazhensky's examination room, now into his dining room, and then into a symbolic prototype of the prison cell that would surely await intellectuals in the future for their “counterrevolutionary” little conversations. Bulgakov's text says nothing about this, but the history of the fatherland is well known…
Oh, how one wanted to push apart the small stage of the Cossack Theatre and give more room to these nonetheless bulky modules, to light these wonderful mirrored decorations better, with their reflections and illusions. At certain moments the lighting of the stage resembled Malevich's Black Square more than anything else…
Bulgakov's brilliant text has long been taken apart into quotations. And as for the fact that “ruin is not in the closets, but in the heads,” anyone can speak about it no worse than Professor Preobrazhensky. Actor Yuri Morozov, in that role, was imperturbable and pedantic; he spoke in an even voice and wearily complained to the charismatic Andrey Grigoriev as Doctor Bormenthal:
“Why was the carpet removed from the front staircase? Does Karl Marx forbid keeping carpets on stairs? Does Karl Marx say anywhere that the second entrance of Kalabukhov's house on Prechistenka should be boarded up and that people should go around through the back yard? Who needs this? Why can a proletarian not leave his galoshes downstairs instead of dirtying the marble?”
The hopelessness in the actor's voice is quite understandable, but could he be heard in the gallery? Surely this can be adjusted in later performances.
The most difficult task belonged to Alexander Krivich, and he coped with it brilliantly: to show the transformation of the sweetest, sly and kind mongrel Sharik into the terrifying homunculus Sharikov, a sadist ready to strangle not only all the cats of Moscow but also his new “Frankensteins.” Incidentally, the scenes of the surgical operation during which the Creature was born looked exactly like real horror.
By contrast, the collective rehearsals of the house committee's amateur performances become outright phantasmagoria: dancing while embracing chairs, a bizarre melodic mix of “The Dog Waltz,” Aida and “Whirlwinds of Danger”… Everything has mixed together and turned upside down…
The performance is not simply about a good dog being turned into a two-legged scoundrel and, after his upbringing fails, being turned back into a dog. The question is where the people born of an era of radical experiments led the country, and what we inherited from them.
“Bulgakov has absolutely not lost his relevance today, in 2019,” says director Vladimir Tikhonravov. “And now, perhaps, it is even harder to understand the laws of psychophysics when ‘the pituitary gland knocks in the brain.’ But the main thing in the development of civilization is not to lose honor, conscience and dignity.”
There was one more actress in the production who deserves special mention. “Sharik the dog before the operation” was played by a real shepherd dog named Archie, touchingly listed at the end of the program. Beforehand this red-haired beauty honestly passed the casting, and on stage she proved herself a real star: she did not react to foreign smells or sounds, and disciplinedly fulfilled every mise-en-scène. At the very end, she confidently licked Alexander Krivich, her stage partner, on the nose.
Yulia Grechukhina,
Volgogradskaya Pravda, 17.05.2019
