There is no bigger headache for a theater critic than “normal” performances. A great show is a lot to write home about. Too bad, you just have to choose the intonation – from angry to compassionate. But what about a “normal” show?
Director Sergejs Golomazovs has been the artistic director of Mikhail Chekhov’s Riga Russian Theater since the fall of 2018. His productions are solid, professional, with good acting, but they are not innovative and do not cause loud discussions. For a theater from which all audience groups expect something suitable for themselves, such an artistically stable, non-provocative point of view can be part of a certain survival strategy. The latest work of Sergey Golomazov – a version of Woody Allen’s comedy – can also be added to it Central Park West/Central Park West.
More than comedy?
The necessary – in fact inevitable – production for the theater box office appears at a moment when the storm of opinions about what this theater should be in the current political situation has subsided a bit. When the Ministry of Culture did not extend the contract with the director of the Riga Russian Theater, Dana Bjorkas, and announced the upcoming competition in which she can participate, but without guaranteed victory, a wave of absolutely opposite opinions prevailed over the theater. One of the criticisms received by Dana Bjork was the too large proportion of the entertainment repertoire, which I think is an unjustified criticism. It is difficult to include the productions of Sergey Golomazov in recent years as entertainment, such as the one dedicated to the Holocaust The event in Vichyas well as solutions to the themes of power and conscience in the show Long live the queen, vivat!. However, Woody Allen’s work is clearly an entertainment production, so as the director reflects on the theater’s website that “if you look deeper, a much more serious topic emerges – no matter how successful and wealthy a person is, it does not guarantee the presence of high spiritual values and does not insure against internal emptiness and sloppiness, and sooner or later the true content of the personality is revealed anyway”.
It is symptomatic that a certain search for depth was also declared in 2008, when Oleg Shapošnikovs staged a version of this play in the Liepāja Theater. “Since we live in an era of narcissism and the strongest is the tendency to love oneself, people are inadequate in the expression of their feelings and inadequate in communication,” the director explained at the time. However, the specific production has not left a deep mark in the history of the theater.
In the offer of the Mikhail Chekhov Theater, an attempt is made to expand the scale of the play with an ensemble of musicians, who from time to time play a verse from The Beatles songs Come Together (soloist Rodion Kuzmins), while the stage workers move the parts of the huge Venus of Willendorf sculpture designed by set designer Mihail Kramenko to connect them together at the end. The only effect that is achieved in this way is certain moments of respite for both the actors and the audience, because the action of the play takes place in one room, and if it were played completely realistically, no shifts would be made in it. However, the director demonstrates that what is happening on the stage is a game, for example, at the very beginning, when Ekaterina Frolova’s heroine Phyllis breaks the dishes in a fit of rage, a transparent curtain is lowered from the attic to prevent the fragments from hitting the audience. The realism is also diluted by the angels played by Vladislav Janushenok and Konstantin Nikulin, who mostly have only the function of decorative observers, they come to more active action only when a revolver appears on the stage.
An object of desire
Anyone who has seen even one of Woody Allen’s films with his own participation has the visual image of the author in front of their eyes – funny and melancholy at the same time. Perhaps plays are also designed to be of this type Central Park West the hero Sam is a middle-aged lawyer who is not particularly handsome, but paradoxically enjoys the attention of several women. Sam is faithfully played by Igor Cherniavskis. The character played by the actor, who wants to leave both his wife and his lover for a very young girl, is a tired seeming success in mid-life crisis. A typologically similar character is the character played by Andras Keiš in Alvja Hermani’s play Beautiful view In the New Riga Theater, but in Woody Allen’s play, this man is not the central character, but only the object of a female wrestler who appears on the stage a long time after the beginning of the play. Igor Cherniavski does not play an eccentric comedic character by any means, his Sam is a slightly phlegmatic – and slightly boring – old man among raging furies. In Woody Allen’s play, the important thing is that Sam’s wife Phyllis is a psychotherapist and each character has some mental problems: Phyllis’s best friend and rival Carol had a period in her life when she tried to imitate Phyllis in everything (Carol’s costume created by Valentina Začinaeva shows that this period are over), Carol’s husband Howard is a typical loser who regularly contemplates suicide, while Sam’s current crush, Juliet, is generally Phyllis’s patient.
Ekaterina Frolova’s Phyllis drinks quite a lot, and we can only guess whether she does so only when she finds out about her husband’s infidelity, or if she looks at the bottle systematically. Under the influence of intoxication, she is capable of becoming quite clever (the Russian word “suchka” sounds particularly offensive), because the very fact that a man wants to leave her undermines her self-confidence. The creators of the show don’t say what really is the basis of women’s obsession when the object of their desire is such an ordinary, albeit quite successful man in terms of career. Phyllis seems to be annoyed by the fact that the infidelity has been so blatant and literally in front of her, while for the eccentric Carol of Veronika Plotnikova, the possibility of conquering a man of status in society makes her feel less of a failure than accepting life with Howard.
Veronika Plotnikova’s character is the brightest from the entire galaxy, both visually (the red-haired turd can be seen in parts) and in the form of expressions, it is a believable, albeit grotesque, character. An aura of mystery surrounds Shamil Khamatov, the actor who played Howard in the premiere, whose name is neither printed in the program nor found in the cast list of the show on the website, so that viewers who rarely visit the Mikhail Chekhov Theater might think they are seeing Vitaly Yakovlev mentioned in the program.
It seems that unlike Chulpana Hamatova, who immediately found a place on the staff of the New Riga Theater, her younger brother has been offered a freelance role. Shamil Hamatov is a dynamic, attractive actor with a good sense of humor and works organically on stage. In the small role of Juliet, Ariadna Tatjana Zacheste (Julia Berngardt in another cast) accentuates her character’s shyness and inability to tell a middle-aged man that the young woman does not really have such ambitious plans for the future as he does.
The one-hour and forty-minute show performs its entertainment function without special artistic pretensions, but with self-respect. The actors successfully keep the tempo, but the choice not to brighten up all the characters this time is perhaps even a relatively better solution than the noisy frolicking in Sergey Golomazov’s production. Stepanchikova village. How is? Normal. We will stay with that.
Central Park West
at the Riga Russian Theater on the 14th, 25th II, 11.III at 19, 12.III at 17, 14.IV at 19, 15.IV at 18
Tickets Ticket service in the network EUR 15–30
