In the shadows of the new city of light
The Independent 5th March 1998
In 1983, Michael Pennington starred in Yuri Lyubimov’s London staging of ‘Crime and
Punishment’. Earlier this year, he went to Moscow in search of his old friend, and
found a city struggling to establish a new identity.
The scene: a gala performance in Moscow in memory of Vladimir Vysotsky, legendary
actor, chanteur and poet, at Yuri Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre. It is attended by Boris
Yemtsov, Yeltsin’s deputy Prime Minister. During an interlude, a young actor brilliantly
impersonates first Brezhnev (“Who is this Vysotsky?”), then Gorbachev (“Vysotsky
started the ball rolling, I followed it up”), and finally Yeltsin himself, promising
that, in future, Vysotsky’s birthday will be marked by payment of all Russian workers’
overdue back-pay. This light reference to a topical scandal brings the house down;
even Yemtsov and his pals are seen to roll in the aisles. The Taganka, crucible of
political dissent in Moscow theatre throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is suddenly a
freeway for political cabaret, weighing in like Spitting Image.
That day in January would have been Vysotsky’s 60th birthday, and I wonder what he,
scourge of greedy apparatchiks and a rallying-point Hamlet at the Taganka in the
1970s, would have made of it. Dead in 1980 – at the age of 42 – from heart disease
aggravated by chronic drinking, his funeral procession brought Moscow to a standstill,
and until recently you could still see little candle-lit Vysotsky shrines on many
street corners. He lies now in the same cemetery as Andrei Sakharov, and on his birthday
buses leave the Taganka Theatre at regular intervals to visit the grave.
Typically, though, Vysotsky (“the keeper of the nation’s spirit, of our pain and
all our joys”) used to work not so much in theatres, concert halls and studios as
in private apartments or on the streets, as the spirit took him: people would simply
gather, squat down and listen. The best image in Lyubimov’s commemorative show was
of 25 actors crouched attentively on the floor, while a block of auditorium seating
covered by a vast white sheet swung gently from side to side above them, like a giant
cradle.
Walking the Soviet high wire with Vysotsky was always Yuri Lybimov. His coded productions
of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment (in which I played Raskolnikov when he bought it to London in
1983) were subtle calls to arms for an audience utterly demoralised by Soviet diktat.
At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov steps forward and quotes, from a
Soviet school textbook, the official view that Raskolnikov was right to kill the
old woman as she was a drain on society. After the show’s unsympathetic portrayal
of his character, the critique is obvious. Lyubimov’s subversive function might now
seem out of date, yet oddly he represents a continuity. His new Brothers Karamazov
(Dostoyevsky again) bears his unrepentant signature. He insists his was never a political
theatre like Brecht’s, but purely a classical one – it’s an astute position, allowing
him to float insouciantly over Russia’s new revolution on his own cradle of international
reclame.
But his side is dented: when he came to the West in 1983, the Soviet government gave
his theatre to a compliant administrator called Nikolai Gubenko, who still, to Lyubimov’s
disgust now that he’s back in Moscow, runs one of the two Taganka auditoria.
Although this loss of half of his old empire rankles deeply, his energies are still
colossal: he attends virtually all his own performances, participating and responding
to the action if necessary (a practice I managed to talk him out of when we worked
together in London), while at the Moscow Art Theatre’s annual birthday celebrations
this year he seemed to achieve a rare feat of prestidigitation: when he rose to pay
a tribute to “the two most important men in Russian theatre”, the accompanying slides
of the Moscow Art’s two founder-directors, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko,
mysteriously got stalled, and two pictures of Lyubimov himself came up instead.
The Moscow Art is now sponsored by Philip Morris, but continues on its unapologetic
unprofitable way: a 20-play repertoire across two theatres dominated by Ostrovsky,
Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Chekhov, with Richard Nelson and Alexander Gellman’s Misha’s
Party (1993) as contemporary as it gets. A loss of nerve in its writing being typical
of a culture suddenly released into what is called freedom, the new agonies of Russian
life have yet to find a voice, so the its theatre hangs in suspended animation.
But there is still an unapologetic sincerity in its making, both from the performers
and its expectant audience. In Moscow, drama is, bracingly, not just a means to pass
the time; and an English professional worn down by the casual humiliations of our
new Ministry of Culture should take a healing trip to Moscow, celebrating its artists
even in post-Revolutionary trauma.
This trauma, however, is complex. Moscow, once perceived as the bleak, “real” Russia,
is now seen as the glamourpuss, while St Petersburg, originally designed to be Moscow’s
showcase city, sinks deeper into decay, violence and despair. Moscow’s Mayor Luzhkov
– known as “walrus” because of his taste for bathing through holes in the midwinter
ice – is not only a great showman but a gifted entrepreneur. For a while, investment
poured into the city. The Iversky Gates into the Kremlin, formerly taken down so
that the tanks could pass through, have been restored; what used to be Gorky Street
(now Tverskaya), a dour highway of low voltage streetlamps, little traffic and unadorned
buildings, is now like Madison Avenue in the rush hour – with a Tiffany’s, a Christian
Lacroix, and Yves Rocher, a Pizza Hut, you name it, all blazing with confidence and
neon.
The heart lifts and then drops again as you realise that nobody but a small, rising
middle class, breasting the waves of corruption and graft, can afford any of this
merchandise; and that, beneath the Mary Quant tulip-cuts and black lipstick, the
salesgirls are the same angry, humiliated citizens as before.
But now you can smell the Mafia everywhere; the manager of the Rossya Hotel has just
been murdered, that of the Radisson a year ago; I heard of the owner of a small bar
who pays over $1,000 a day in protection. Muscovites in a body have always achieved
almost unimaginable standards of boorish discourtesy – except that discourtesy is
the wrong word, since it somehow applies the existence of the opposite, and there
is little evidence of that. As, after a week, you shove in the Metro with the rest,
you might reflect that the brutality of the 19th century has bled into the humiliations
of the 20th, producing a truly barbaric brew beneath the “Marlborough Country” billboards.
The premiere of Lyubimov’s Brothers Karamazov at the Bolshoi in St Petersburg is
an emotional event, more or less coinciding with Lyubimov’s 80th birthday. It is
in his old gestural style, its jagged snatches of music, unpredictable lighting and
his actor’s typically casual-declamatory manner, competing and sometimes crystallising
into brilliant single images. News reporters with video cameras charge down the aisle
during the performance; there is a groaning buffet upstairs after the show, with
speeches and banqueting. Groups from various Petersburg theatres sing new lyrics
to old pop melodies along the lines of: “of, how good, Yuri Petrovich from Taganka…”
The only people not listening are his actors, who are in a corner getting drunk fast.
Suddenly I lose my interpreter Marina, a statuesque journalist in a tweed twin-set
and pearls, who had earlier confided, while rapidly downing four glasses of champagne
as if they were an investment, that she earned only $10 per half-page article. Where
is she? I finally see her up at the end of the table, scooping apples, bananas and
oranges from the banquet and into her handbag.
Plus ca change, of course, and there’s that question again; how do they manage? Visiting
Russia from time to time makes up a rite of passage, and each time a layer of romanticism,
of misplaced interpretation, and a false significance is likely to be knocked off,
leaving you just more sincerely confused. It is an emerging truism that Russians
may have lost as much as they’ve gained in this decade. Behind the fake-fur and mobile-phone
ethos, the Austrian coffee-shops and the cashpoints – in fact the whole dispiriting
evidence of an aping, borrowed culture rather reminiscent of Japan – the mystery
of Russian survival remains, to an outsider, intact. Always, like Marina, they will
shrug and say “Oh, we get by.”
Most Russian friends, acutely sensitive to the probe, continue to carry their secrets
away with them through crashing metal apartment-block doors into their stone hallways,
up in their unconvincing lifts, across their cardboard-matted thresholds. And, with
goodnights touched with both courtesy and shame, they firmly disappear behind front
doors padded against the cold, into a secret life as unchangeable, harsh and enclosing
as the Russian winter.
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