Padam, madam: a puppet cabaret was created at the Sergei Obraztsov Theater
With a white face and disheveled hair, Edith Piaf comes out to the audience and freezes in front of a broken microphone in a silent scream. This is how Boris Konstantinov's play "Silence. The Return", which became an absolute hit with critics and received the "Golden Mask" in 2020. After 10 years of wandering through different scenes, the story of Parisian sparrow Edith Piaf has found a new home. Izvestia was among the first to watch an updated production about the life of the legendary singer.
From the Boyars' Chambers to the Paris cabaret
The play itself has a fate almost as vagrant as Piaf's. The idea of the project was born during the X International Summer Theater School of the Union of Theatrical Figures of Russia. In 2016, "Silence" became the graduation performance of the school, and then settled for a long time in the Boyar Chambers of the STD — among the famous red bricks, narrow stairs and semi-dark vaults. There, the production existed almost perfectly: it seemed that the very air of the old space preserves the memory of poor Parisian streets, cheap cabarets and tragic fates.
Now the play, which won the Golden Mask in 2020, has moved to the art cafe of the famous building with a puppet clock on Sadovaya-Samotechnaya Street. The chief artist of the Obraztsov Theater, Viktor Antonov, turned the space into a Zernis cabaret with small tables, warm light and the atmosphere of old Paris.
The new version, supplemented by the word "return" in the title, begins in the lobby. Chirping mimes pour wine for the guests — alcoholic and non-alcoholic. The audience, warmed up by the fumes of Burgundy and warmed up by the Moscow heat, sway to the beat of the playful accordion melody from the speakers, anticipating the release of the Parisian sparrow — Edith Piaf.
She appears almost imperceptibly — on the stairs, in the spotlight, next to a curved white stick: either a scrubber mop, or a microphone. Piaf opens his mouth to sing one of his legendary songs, but the bar suddenly falls forward, and she falls after it. And immediately strange creatures with long bird noses and berets run out onto the stairs. In their hands is a suitcase that has become a coffin for the singer.
The big-nosed characters scurry around, drop it, pick it up, and bump into each other. And all this in absolute silence. Not a word. No music. At this point, the name of the play takes on an almost physical meaning.
At first, it's even surprising: how can you talk about Piaf without songs? But it's the lack of music that makes Edith's story so painful. Boris Konstantinov, the director of the production and the main director of the theater, generally avoids straightforward presentation. Instead of the usual retelling of life, he creates a scattering of images, memories and emotional outbursts.
From them, the fate of Edith Giovanna Gassion gradually emerges — a girl who was actually born on the street, amidst poverty, alcohol and human cruelty. For the first years of her life, her maternal grandmother looked after her. To keep the baby from crying, she gave her milk watered down with wine. Later, the girl was handed over to another grandmother who ran a brothel in Normandy. It was then that the adults did not notice that Edith was almost blind due to developing keratitis.
At some point, the image of the Mother of God flashes on the black backdrop — a reference to the monastery of St. Therese in Lisieux, where little Edith was taken by her grandmother and where, according to legend, a miracle happened: the girl regained her sight.
Konstantinov has admitted more than once that he was interested not so much in a great singer as in a woman with a difficult fate — how she lived, was ill and continued to sing while the villainous fate was loading a new right hook.
A little sparrow with a broken wing
Although the production is being staged at the Puppet Theater, the main roles here are still given to people — five men: Artem Olkonen, Artur Arutyunov, Donat Gilmanshin, Egor Chudinov, Ilya Obukhov — and one woman, Regina Khabibullina. Moreover, the actress is surprisingly similar to Edith Piaf. The same wide-open eyes, tousled black hair, frailty and stooping figure, and, of course, height. Piaf was only 147 centimeters tall, while Khabibullina was 152.
Piaf got her famous name at the age of 20 when she met Louis Leplet, the owner of the Gernis cabaret. It was he who taught her to be liked by the audience, to choose a repertoire, to stay on stage. And it was Leplet who came up with the pseudonym Piaf for Edith, which in French jargon means "sparrow".
There are a lot of birds in the play. It's not just the heroine herself, who breaks through the shell with her beak, gets into a cruel world, then flies out of the window, then rushes in a cage. Birdlike features can also be discerned in the men surrounding Piaf, and if you believe the legends, there were a lot of them.
Konstantinov's Edith Piaf does not look like a heroine of tragedy in the classical sense. On the contrary, she's tiny, funny, and fragile. Such a little sparrow with a broken wing.
Here is a tiny doll in a black dress in the hands of an actress appearing for the first time in the cabaret "Gernis" on the Champs-Elysees. Louis Leplet is the man who discovered Piaf to the world. Only here he looks like a puppet himself: the artist is pulled by red elastic bands, as if fate itself controls his every move.
The red color becomes the most important symbol of the performance — it is blood, passion, love and death. The same red rubber bands form the ring where Piaf and her great love— boxer Marcel Cerdan, meet. She kisses the letters, and it's like he's practicing jabs and hooks on them. And in this scene you can guess their impossible and doomed love.
Serdan had a wife and three sons, but meeting Piaf turned his life upside down. The press exploded with outrage when they found out about their affair. Then Marcel called a press conference, at which he made only one statement: Edith was his mistress, but if he had not been married, she would have become his wife. We know the ending in advance: the plane, the crash, the death of Serdan on the way to Piaf.
But even if you watch the play without knowing anything about the singer's biography — about the death of her three-year—old daughter, addiction, alcoholism, car accidents and a late affair with 26-year-old Greek Theophanis Lamboukas - you still leave the hall emotionally drained and filled at the same time.
"Silence. The Return" does not look like a gloomy monument or another statement about Edith Piaf. There is a lot of irony, pantomime, clowning, circus lightness and genuine theatrical skill.
Today, the theater often tries to surprise the audience with technology, video projections, big names on posters, heavy costumes and decorations. Everything is arranged differently here: the performance runs for only 80 minutes in a small hall with 80 seats. During this time, six artists, using dozens of dolls and without words at all, tell the story of a little woman who did not regret anything — as she sang in her immortal song Non, je ne regrette rien.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
