Not an “opera” “Onegin”: VGIK played classics without the “textbook gloss”

2024-04-07 16:16:23

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The actors of the play are young, like Pushkin’s heroes

Today, when we have already lost count of the film adaptations of Pushkin’s novel in verse, the production of “Eugene Onegin” at VGIK, where very young actors are employed, is a real breath of fresh air. Its creators, teachers and mentors of the acting department Varvara Postnikova and Galina Ionova, offered us a lively and dynamic spectacle full of humor, completely devoid of the notorious “textbook gloss” and school edification.

The actors of the play are young, like Pushkin’s heroes, which, alas, is not often seen in productions and screen versions of Onegin, so the production clearly does not suffer from excessive seriousness. The life of the characters in the circumstances set by the plot is partly a game, fun, and even a parody: the scene of Tatyana’s letter to Onegin is a kind of antithesis to the “image of Tatyana Larina” (an indispensable theme of essays on literature). The authors of the play show the viewer not only Pushkin the philosopher, but also Pushkin the joker, the interlocutor of his characters, who could sometimes baffle the poet (let us remember his phrase from a letter to a friend: “You know what a trick my Tatyana did – she got married!” ).

The rejection of pomp and traditional “opera” inherent in most stage incarnations of “Onegin” is also expressed in the fact that some characters are played alternately by different artists. They seem to invite the viewer: “Let’s play together!” or “You can also find yourself in his role!” Pushkin’s text, in which not a single line has been changed, sometimes enters into dialogue with the parody of the mise-en-scène – a technique familiar to us primarily from the works of such a master as P.N. Fomenko. The “material part” of the production also deserves special attention: organizing the space with the help of step-ladder chairs, playing with individual props – binoculars, feathers, etc. – against the backdrop of deliberate severity and monochrome costumes.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29252 dated April 8, 2024

Newspaper headline: Not an “opera” “Onegin”