If people are rewarded for demonstrating hubris -- and they should be -- then my head is bowed to Yevgeny Kamenkovich. He set out to do the impossible: adapt and stage James Joyce's monumental novel "Ulysses," in Russian, naturally, at the Fomenko Studio.
May I please hear the appropriate silence followed by gasps.
Paradoxically, perhaps, Kamenkovich brought a certain intimacy to this show even as he let it run its wild course freely. Just nine actors play 50 characters, while the show runs five and a half hours in length. Is this a recipe for chaos? Miraculously, perhaps, the show achieves as much coherence as you could rightfully expect from a novel that has baffled readers as insightful as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound for 90 years. Kamenkovich captured the strange, dream-sequence quality of a single day in the lives of a handful of Dubliners that Joyce describes in some 1,000 pages.
The Jewish outsider Leopold Bloom, played with an oddly moving sense of banality by Anatoly Goryachev, strikes one at times as a literary relative of Franz Kafka's hapless heroes. He is more active in his resistance to, and somewhat less trapped by, the existential forces of the world, but he is a quintessential "little" man, a cog in big machine that outweighs him at every turn. Goryachev's achievement is quite remarkable. While keeping a low, almost colorless profile, he gradually reveals more and more of himself. While we never really get to know this person, we recognize him as someone who shares foibles, fears and aspirations that we know ourselves.
Less clear in this production is Stephen Dedalus, the young writer who has rejected his father and struggles in vain to come to terms with the death of his mother. This has less to do with what is actually an incisive performance by Yury Butorin than it does with the limits of our ability to follow divergent story lines over such a long period of time. There is a strong segment of Dedalus talking Shakespeare and Hamlet to a bunch of stuffed shirts at the National Library, but the connections to everything else are tentative at best. The randomness of Joyce's novel is not entirely conducive to lucid theater.
What this "Ulysses" probably does best is provide an assortment of interesting scenes. Questions of how they are connected and what they mean in relation to one another often go unanswered. But rather like mini-shows running from 10 to 20 minutes, these scenes are quite entertaining. This is especially true of the long encounter between Leopold and Gerty MacDowell, a lonely young woman pining for love and willing to titillate a stranger from a distance by "accidentally" revealing more flesh than is socially acceptable. This semi-imaginary, masturbatory meeting between two lost souls is staged by Kamenkovich with a good deal of humor and beauty. Roza Shmukler is a downright pepper pot as Gerty.
But it is the final scene, the famous monologue by Molly Bloom, Leopold's long-suffering wife, that makes Kamenkovich's "Ulysses" what it is. Polina Kutepova slowly eases her way into the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that Joyce composed as a single sentence consisting of nearly 4,200 words. As she builds up steam, rattling over and under the topics of frustration, jealousy, anger, lust, love, perfidy, tenderness and forgiveness, Kutepova throws back the cloak of propriety that ordinarily hides the teeming cauldron of human instincts and desires. She is spunky in measure, a little bit jaded and seductively uncouth, yet she is blessed with a wholesomeness that comes through in her thin, almost apologetic voice.
Vladimir Maksimov provided the jungle-gym set of open, multitiered metal constructions that can be reconfigured or moved offstage quickly. Images and words projected on the back wall provide some orientation as to which of the 18 parts of the novel is currently being performed.
Kamenkovich, aided by Oleg Lyubimov and Oksana Globa, made subtle use of sounds and music, contributing to the sense of time inexorably getting away from these "common" characters residing in Dublin, Ireland.
Surely, the makers of such an ambitious production must answer only to themselves in terms of success or failure. To my mind, the fact that this show exists at all is proof of its success. Even if I couldn't keep pace with it at all times, I was always in awe of the task at hand. And then there is that marvelous half hour with Molly. Who wouldn't wait five hours to see that?
"Ulysses" (Uliss) plays March 29, April 4, 11, 19 and 25 at 5 p.m. at the Fomenko Studio, located at 29 Naberezhnaya Tarasa Shevchenko. Metro Kutuzovskaya. Tel. 8 499 249-1921. www.fomenko.theatre.ru. Running time: 5 hours 40 minutes.
May I please hear the appropriate silence followed by gasps.
Paradoxically, perhaps, Kamenkovich brought a certain intimacy to this show even as he let it run its wild course freely. Just nine actors play 50 characters, while the show runs five and a half hours in length. Is this a recipe for chaos? Miraculously, perhaps, the show achieves as much coherence as you could rightfully expect from a novel that has baffled readers as insightful as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound for 90 years. Kamenkovich captured the strange, dream-sequence quality of a single day in the lives of a handful of Dubliners that Joyce describes in some 1,000 pages.
The Jewish outsider Leopold Bloom, played with an oddly moving sense of banality by Anatoly Goryachev, strikes one at times as a literary relative of Franz Kafka's hapless heroes. He is more active in his resistance to, and somewhat less trapped by, the existential forces of the world, but he is a quintessential "little" man, a cog in big machine that outweighs him at every turn. Goryachev's achievement is quite remarkable. While keeping a low, almost colorless profile, he gradually reveals more and more of himself. While we never really get to know this person, we recognize him as someone who shares foibles, fears and aspirations that we know ourselves.
Less clear in this production is Stephen Dedalus, the young writer who has rejected his father and struggles in vain to come to terms with the death of his mother. This has less to do with what is actually an incisive performance by Yury Butorin than it does with the limits of our ability to follow divergent story lines over such a long period of time. There is a strong segment of Dedalus talking Shakespeare and Hamlet to a bunch of stuffed shirts at the National Library, but the connections to everything else are tentative at best. The randomness of Joyce's novel is not entirely conducive to lucid theater.
What this "Ulysses" probably does best is provide an assortment of interesting scenes. Questions of how they are connected and what they mean in relation to one another often go unanswered. But rather like mini-shows running from 10 to 20 minutes, these scenes are quite entertaining. This is especially true of the long encounter between Leopold and Gerty MacDowell, a lonely young woman pining for love and willing to titillate a stranger from a distance by "accidentally" revealing more flesh than is socially acceptable. This semi-imaginary, masturbatory meeting between two lost souls is staged by Kamenkovich with a good deal of humor and beauty. Roza Shmukler is a downright pepper pot as Gerty.
But it is the final scene, the famous monologue by Molly Bloom, Leopold's long-suffering wife, that makes Kamenkovich's "Ulysses" what it is. Polina Kutepova slowly eases her way into the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that Joyce composed as a single sentence consisting of nearly 4,200 words. As she builds up steam, rattling over and under the topics of frustration, jealousy, anger, lust, love, perfidy, tenderness and forgiveness, Kutepova throws back the cloak of propriety that ordinarily hides the teeming cauldron of human instincts and desires. She is spunky in measure, a little bit jaded and seductively uncouth, yet she is blessed with a wholesomeness that comes through in her thin, almost apologetic voice.
Vladimir Maksimov provided the jungle-gym set of open, multitiered metal constructions that can be reconfigured or moved offstage quickly. Images and words projected on the back wall provide some orientation as to which of the 18 parts of the novel is currently being performed.
Kamenkovich, aided by Oleg Lyubimov and Oksana Globa, made subtle use of sounds and music, contributing to the sense of time inexorably getting away from these "common" characters residing in Dublin, Ireland.
Surely, the makers of such an ambitious production must answer only to themselves in terms of success or failure. To my mind, the fact that this show exists at all is proof of its success. Even if I couldn't keep pace with it at all times, I was always in awe of the task at hand. And then there is that marvelous half hour with Molly. Who wouldn't wait five hours to see that?
"Ulysses" (Uliss) plays March 29, April 4, 11, 19 and 25 at 5 p.m. at the Fomenko Studio, located at 29 Naberezhnaya Tarasa Shevchenko. Metro Kutuzovskaya. Tel. 8 499 249-1921. www.fomenko.theatre.ru. Running time: 5 hours 40 minutes.
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