Three theatrical heroes
Spacious, but emphatically modest office in the Moscow Theater of Poets. No leather furniture or mahogany. On the walls are diplomas, joint photographs and numerous photo collages. And also a watch in the form of a steering wheel – I mark it in a notebook to ask an additional question. Vyacheslav Spesivtsev shakes hands in a friendly manner, offers to sit down and immediately holds out a business card.
“This is Sema, me and Vasya,” he says, explaining the picture depicting Semyon, Vyacheslav and Vasily Spesivtsev in the image of Vasnetsov’s “Three Heroes”. “Nikas Safronov came up with this,” says the owner of the office. And adds:
– I have four sons, but only two went on the theatrical path. I have directed our theater for thirty-five years and continue to direct, but now they are at the head.
— Vyacheslav Semenovich, what are your plans for the future? I mean the future of your theater and Russian theater in general.
– Once I thought: at 80, why does a person live? It’s time for him to die. (Laughs.) And now I just got a taste for life! Why Andron puts on performances in his eighty-five, goes everywhere and shoots films. So I was imbued – why not live longer?
The theater is worth living.
“We have always needed the theater, but the theater also needed us. There are a lot of performances today. The good ones, the wonderful ones, the bad ones, and the ugly ones. This is not because the theater is bad or good, it is simply in search. I was lucky – I had such a period when I was fired from everywhere, so I could not even get a job as a janitor. And there was time to read Stanislavsky – to be honest, no one reads him. But he said everything in his works: “The theater of the future is when the locomotive of feelings rolls along the line of action.” The trick is that Konstantin Sergeevich told his students – Tarkhanov, Kachalov, Moskvin that feelings should not be played. What a gain. But he ended the creation of his system and life in general with the fact that he predicted just such a path of development. So no need to grab your head, asking where the theater is going and what we should do when someone shows their bare ass for fifteen minutes and considers it a discovery. And someone does not show. All the same, the theater will develop as Stanislavsky said.
– You have a clock in the form of a steering wheel in your office. How do you see your task as a captain? What is special about your approach to working with young actors?
– Pale colleagues often come to me with the question: where to go next? The spectator does not accept or, on the contrary, accepts … Yes, they are right, the spectator turned out to be the main thing for the theater. So 2500 years ago the viewer chose the best play by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, the most necessary for the state, for the existence of Greek democracy. The theater had such tasks – grandiose and amazing. But in order to choose a play, so that someone could exist as a theatrical business, a stage, it was necessary first to educate the viewer!
People often ask me: why do you go to schools and show performances – “Woe from Wit” or “The Cherry Orchard”? One day the phone rang: “The Plenipotentiary Ambassador of China to Russia is talking to you.” At first I thought someone was playing a prank. He answered the phone with irony: “Well, yes, just China?” But it turned out that the ambassador speaks and reads excellent Russian: “I heard that you play in Chekhov’s classes. I want to see it!” (The Chinese are curious, so they are ahead of the rest.) I invite the ambassador: come, school is such and such. True, I later received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for this: they say, I had no right to call the ambassador, all of a sudden a brick would fall on him. (Laughs.) But brick is not in my competence, I am engaged in art.
Mr. Ambassador has arrived and is watching. And I enter the classroom and say: “Guys, are you playing a Chekhov play in the tenth grade? Let’s play it!”
“Like this? What is this?” I hear exclamations. I suggest to the children: “Let’s all get up and turn into trees,” I raise my hands, “do I look like a tree?” “Looks like it,” they answer. They are all humorous, pranksters. From this turn of events, the Chinese guest was stunned, together with us he began to raise his hands.
– How would Anton Pavlovich react to such a “revival of trees”?
– If you read Chekhov accurately, you will find that in the play Petya Trofimov says to Anya: “Aren’t human beings looking at you from every cherry, from every leaf, from every trunk?”
And if you give children the opportunity to become characters, let them perform a play by roles (it’s not written for reading, but for playing!) – they will find themselves in the very fantasy in which they live and which leads them through life. No wonder now the most popular genre of films is superhero movies, batmen and hobbits are different.
Shells against Napoleon
— But movies based on comics are something simple and accessible, while classics are incredibly complex.
– When I hear proposals to throw Leo Tolstoy out of the school curriculum – four volumes of War and Peace – I object: “Are you out of your mind? If we leave that out, how do teenagers know that the love they dream of, that they think they can “do”, is God. And let someone complain that children only interfere with performances. If we abandon the youth, if we don’t ride, if they don’t play trees, we’ll lose a spectator. And in five years theaters can be closed!
– How to find an audience is approximately clear, but how to keep it?
– There is one secret, and it was opened by the Moscow Youth Theater. Since then, we have been doing this at all performances. It is necessary that not only the director, not only the artist, but also the spectator become the creator of the performance. Therefore, when Firs comes out in the final and says the words that he was forgotten, all the artists begin to sing: “Evening bells, evening bells, how many thoughts it brings – bom, bom …”. And Firs says: “Maybe you will sing too?” And the hall, provoked to the beautiful, picks up: “Bom, bom …”. And when the viewer sings with us, he becomes a co-creator, accepts the lesson of Chekhov, Moliere and Tolstoy.
– Do you also play Lev Nikolayevich?
Yes, War and Peace. Two lessons of forty-five minutes. We take a break for ten minutes, go with the guys for lunch. And we continue. And in the middle, one of the characters says, “We’re out of ammo.” The command sounds: “Carry the shells.” Boxes are brought in, and in them the balls are painted balls. We throw these balls into the auditorium; at first everyone is afraid, and then they understand and begin to catch them. And on the stage, a portrait of Napoleon is put together from boxes, and we begin to drive him out of Moscow with these balls.
– The children must be delighted? ..
But adults don’t always. We brought our production of Molière to Paris, we also wanted War and Peace. The Parisians said: the performance is wonderful, but throw out the episode where Napoleon is driven away. He is their national hero!
— When we talk about the actors of the 20-30s of the XX century, we perceive them as long gone, separated from us by an epic distance. Meanwhile, your master was Igor Ilyinsky, who worked for Meyerhold at the Theater of the RSFSR 1 and played the main role in the legendary film Volga-Volga.
– Do you know that Ilyinsky was called the Charlie Chaplin of the Soviet Union? He was really great and incredibly popular. I initially entered Sliver, but they didn’t accept me there. With grief, he went to the circus school to become a clown. Yuri Vladimirovich Nikulin took me – I don’t know why, I’ve never been funny.
And suddenly, quite by chance, Viktor Tatarsky calls me, he entered the Shchepkinskoye school and asked for help with the general sketch “Circus”, but I knew everything about it. We began to rehearse together, and the course was led by Ilyinsky. He noticed me. I remember always addressing me by my last name: “Spesivtsev! I take you to me without exams. On one condition – you will come to my funeral. Knock and say: “As agreed, I came.” Write down the text. Of course, I followed this instruction of the teacher.
And when I created my own theater, I realized: I managed to overcome my fate – Igor Vladimirovich noticed me. But what about others? And then I organized studios: from five to eleven – the youngest, from twelve to fourteen – the middle one, from fourteen to seventeen – the eldest. Come, I take everyone without listening!
Understand that life itself will figure out who needs to do this, and who does not. If it is possible to save them so that they do not go to the alley to drink vodka in the end, you need to give everyone a chance.
– How did Ilyinsky treat you?
– He said: “I believe in you, because you perceive the theater strangely, like Meyerhold.” These are his words. After all, they believed that Meyerhold was a little out of his mind. People who grew up at the Russian acting school saw how, at the wave of his hand, a sailor ran out onto the stage and shouted: “Ours occupied Tavrida!”.
But he was a director of incredible vision.
This is the same “I am” from the Stanislavsky system: I am in the shoes of a hero and cannot move. The biggest deception of the viewer is when the artist is untruthful, when he cannot be trusted. But today he needs to be trusted differently than in the 20s of the last century.
I follow the path of Shchepkin, who took children from the age of eight and worked with them, and Karatygin from the age of seven. I didn’t come up with this approach. But here is my discovery made by the Moscow Youth Theatre.
An actor needs an initial stage. Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov started right with the Pike and skipped this stage. And the initial one is just Shchepkinsky, the development of fantasy.
The figure skater has been practicing since the age of five, the musician since the age of six. It’s too late to start acting since the age of seventeen. At this age, young men and women have already taken place, they are thinking about the wedding. And tell a five-year-old “turn into a dog” – please! “In an evil dog” – please. He has no clamp, no rejection.
We will not tell the seventeen-year-old tall man to twist the triple axel. It will just break. Why do we understand everything there, but not here?
Subchik and One Hundred Years of Solitude
What do you consider to be the most important performance of yours?
– I had Shakespeare, Valentin Rasputin “Farewell to Mother”, Shukshin, Chingiz Aitmatov. And the main genius is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a light thrown on the future theater, where you need to play a feeling, a state, a feeling, a mood.
Nikita Khrushchev invited Marquez to the USSR, wanted to show that he knew him, that he had read the novel. I invited him to the jury of the International Youth Festival – and he fell for it. At a press conference in Moscow, an overseas guest said: “You have some subchik staged my One Hundred Years of Solitude. What is happening in your country? I left this conference, I thought, now there will be glory, but it turned out to be completely different. After her, Marquez was met in the Latin America magazine, the editor-in-chief called me: “Gabriel demands you, wants to look into your impudent eyes.” I’m coming.
— How could you deliver what is impossible to deliver?
And I told him:
– Let’s do it … You are watching a performance. Yes, we keep it; no, we remove it.
He agreed to watch “fifteen minutes”. I sat in rehearsal for three hours. He liked it incredibly. And he wrote the text: “I allow performances based on my works, but only to the Spesivtsev Theater.”
This is my favorite show. But there are other favorites, where our studio members are now participating: children, youth, my Vasya and Syoma. They staged Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Gaidar’s Malchish-Kibalchish. So, they go in their own way, but this is also the direction we have found.