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krasan film jer će govoriti о nečemu što prevazilazi okvire svakodnevice, i zbog nečeg će za mene biti veoma važno da taj film vidim iako živim daleko od Gruzije i na mukama sam jer nikako ne uspevam da napra vim podelu za Kralja Lira .. . □ Sovetskii teatr 83 /3, Pozoriite je duša koja leti po kišnom Batumiju . . , Razgovor vodila Galina Kožuhova

Dacha in the country Anatoly Vasiliev’s extraordinary Moscovy production of Victor Slavkin's Cerceau (LI FT, Riverside, one more performance this afternoon) begins where The Cherry Orchard leaves off, with the sound of an axe striking wood. The audience sits at both ends of an oblong across the centre of which

stands the garden room and roof terrace of a Russian country house, boarded up. Petushok (Ä. Filozov) and his five friends - two women, three men-are literally hacking their way out from the inside until they are revealed as a delighted group of celebrants relishing the pleasures of a new gift. Petushok has inherited the dacha from a great-aunt. They hang mischievously from the stairwell and lean idly from the frames. They flirt, and dance into the garden to the decorous sound of boogie and jive. They kick the very air in disbelief and give every sign of great energy stirring to life and waiting to be used. Being Russian, they also talk a great deal, and grow discursively anecdotal into the fourth hour, which is where Western spectators (complete English texts and simultaneous translation are both available at Riverside) will question the play's Russian identity and detect familiar influences from abroad - Bergman, Pinter and Albee to name only three. Nevertheless, such testing absorp-

tion is part of glasnost itself-the play began at the Taganka Theatre in July 1985-and the image of the patched house as State /society/ soul is indestructibly powerful, recalling not only Chekhov bet the redoubt of the Oid Believers in Mussorgsky’s opera Khovantchina and the prepared sacrifice in Tarkovsky's final film. Slavkin's humanism suggests the posibility of a buoyant and unsuperstitious Christianity flooding the parched ground of selfish materialism into new life. Cerceau itself is an ancient courtly game in which hoops are tossed high in the air and caught on light swordsticks shaped like a Christian cross. The long second act ends with the parody of an Orthodox ceremonial followed by a game in which all the participants lob hoops at each other over the roof-and, even more daringly, right through the garden room-of the mysterious house. The ownership passes to the elderly eccentric giant. Koka (A. Petrenko) who turns out to have married Petushok’s aunt in 1924; the friends nail it up again, leaving, however,

two strong hints that they will soon return. I think the production will be remembered longer than the play. Vasiliev's three-dimensional use of space, with its acceptance of partial visibility, is radical and cinematic, like Wajda’s staged Crime and Punishment seen in Edinburgh last year but not, as far as I know, yet used by any British theatre director here. It is hazardous and bold, but it turns the audience into eavesdropping voyeurs and charpens the focus of our attention marvellously ... □ Observer July 1987, Michael Kateli ffe

Анатолий Васильев Главный режиссер театра Школа драматического искусства. Закончил Ростовский университет

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