April 11 in Berlin showed a one-man show “I’m here” directed by Yegor Trukhin and actor Anatoly Bely. The artist of the heroic role for the first time acted as a “little man” and bowed six times.
Anatoly Bely as Man
He appears without an announcement in the auditorium, where the lights have not yet gone out, and the audience does not immediately finish small talk, suddenly realizing that for some reason it has become quiet around … In a hunched, ugly shuffling figure, one would never recognize a recognized handsome man and hero – lover of Anatoly Bely. In this play, he has the only role – Man. He has a washed-out cap, two backpacks that are constantly falling down, interfering with every movement, which you can’t get used to conveniently take, a wrinkled guilty face. A man got into this hall by accident, he, along with other spectators, is waiting for the start of the performance. Constantly apologizing, he squeezes through those sitting to an empty seat, from where he is almost immediately driven out. He is very funny, this fool: at first he awkwardly tries to appropriate someone else’s ticket, is offended when he is taken out into the open, sprinkles with funny words and sayings. When, crouching and semen, clutching his stupid backpacks, he runs away from the guard, the audience roars with unanimous laughter.
Little by little, his unintelligible speech develops into a story. “My last name is Lot,” he explains, constantly putting on, then taking off, then crumpling his cap in his hands. And then – something terrible: about the “arrival”, how everyone around ran “out of this hell”, and he and his wife ran. “She was good, she didn’t drink or smoke,” he convinces the audience. She just forgot that she couldn’t turn around, and stayed there forever. “I fell asleep with my head, they couldn’t find it.”
No one wants to laugh anymore. It becomes clear that before the audience – the hero is on the very last verge of nervous exhaustion. He either cheers up, jokes stupidly, fools around, then suddenly he twists his face ugly and cries real tears.
The performance is based on topical anti-war poetry
Poetry enters the performance as a crumpled note, which the Man discovers on the stage. He unfolds it, slowly reads the first line of Lena Berson’s poem “Mom, don’t let me go to war” and dumbfounded asks the audience: “What is this?” This dramatic episode was not immediately introduced into the performance. The poem inspired Bely so much that he created a separate mise-en-scene for him when the production was already ready.
This opens the next block of the play. Powerful texts and poems are heard here, which the authors of the production selected from thousands of works that appeared after the start of the war. They were written by Alya Khaitlina, Zhenya Berkovich, Vadim Zhuk and others. This is the culmination of the play. A man shouts out words, twisting his nature, wheezes lines and starts a terrible desperate dance to the recitative of Roman Osminkin’s poem “people continued to live / listen to music smoke / stand silent at the window / and not notice shit.”
One of the emotional peaks is a poem by Zhenya Berkovich, which has become viral in social networks, about how the ghost of a grandfather who fought, comes to a lyrical hero. “Could you, my dear, beloved grandson, Never write anything about me on Facebook? In no context, neither with the letter Z, nor without the letter Z, Just take it and don’t do it, grandfather asks. name, No victories at all.”
Tragicomedy with arias
In the recent past, the leading actor of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater Anatoly Bely and a young graduate of GITIS, director Yegor Trukhin, began working together in the summer of 2022 in Israel, where they left after the outbreak of the war. At first, Bely wanted to make a performance entirely from poems about the war, which began to appear en masse after February 24. The artist took part in the project “Russian Lessons” of the Dozhd TV channel, where he read anti-war poetry and prose in Russian. Yegor Trukhin proposed to Bely an original concept – to act in the tragicomic role of a jester. The idea was inspired by the image of Charlie Chaplin – indeed, it is his funny figure that is remembered in the scenes of the guard chasing the Man or chasing the beam of the lighting spotlight.
Anatoly Bely admits that this is the first completely non-heroic role in his career. In Man, he combined the images of familiar emigrants and repatriates. Even two backpacks, with which the hero suffers for most of the performance, appeared for a reason: it was with two backpacks, one on his back and the other on his stomach, that the director of the play, Yegor Trukhin, set foot on the promised land in 2022. The highest tempo of the play does not let the viewer go until the end. Even when the hero is just listening to music, it is impossible to distract from his lively facial expressions. After the performance of the artist, the Berlin audience called for a bow six times, which was noticeably touched.
Only one musical composition sounds in the performance – the symbolic aria “Casta diva” performed by Maria Callas. In Bellini’s opera, the high priestess turns to the gods for help and predicts the complete fall of Roman rule and the liberation of her native land.
The solo performance “I’m Here” is now touring in Germany. On April 11 it was shown in Berlin, today, on April 12, it will be shown in Hamburg, on the 13th – in Cologne, on the 15th – in Offenbach, on the 17th – in Hannover. Link – Detailed information about screenings and tickets.