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.