New Names and Developments in St. Petersburg Theater

I was in St. Petersburg last week for the presentation of a new collection of film scripts by the great Russian playwright and screenwriter Nikolai Erdman.

The event was held at the cozy and very cool Poryadok Slov ("Word Order") bookstore at 15 Naberezhnaya Fontanki, just a stone's throw from the Anichkov Bridge on Nevsky Prospekt. After the festivities ended, I cornered one of the attendees and asked him to tell me a little about what is new and interesting in St. Petersburg theater.

The atmosphere was a bit hectic with guests still hanging around and talking animatedly, but Nikolai Pesochinsky, an assistant professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts, is used to keeping his cool under chaotic conditions. In just a few minutes, he delivered a fine impromptu lecture about several important developments in St. Petersburg theater.

Perhaps most important of all is a new institution of sorts called Ontheater, as in "online theater." This is a place where young directors are now encountering the works of the so-called "new Russian drama."

St. Petersburg, a city more closely tied to its traditions than Moscow, has been reluctant to embrace many of the bold new writers who have helped to revive the theater process in Moscow over the last decade.

Pesochinsky points out that Ontheater is not the St. Petersburg equivalent of Moscow's Teatr.doc, one of Russia's key centers for innovation in drama, but that new directors have begun to make names for themselves in their work on new drama. They include Dmitry Volkostrelov, a former student of master director Lev Dodin, and Ksenia Mitrofanova.

At the Alexandrinsky Theater, artistic director Valery Fokin — a "refugee" from Moscow — has done much to bring post-modern directors to St. Petersburg. They include the Polish master Kristian Lupa and the U.S.-based, Romanian-born director Andrei Serban.

Serban brought to St. Petersburg his production of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," a piece that Pesochinsky described as a "destruction" of the play that "leads into something else."

Another important foreign director making a mark in St. Petersburg is the Lithuanian Jonas Vaitkus. Working at the Baltic House, he mounted a "surrealistic" production of Chekhov's "The Seagull," which imagined the whole play as a compilation of dreams emanating from the imagination of the character Konstantin Treplev.

Pesochinsky identified director Lev Erenburg as St. Petersburg's Pedro Almodovar. Erenburg, who is currently nominated for a Golden Mask award for his production of Maxim Gorky's "Vassa Zheleznova" at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, has also had success in the city of Magnitogorsk, where he staged an award-winning production of Alexander Ostrovsky's "The Storm" a few years ago.

Erenburg began his career and continues to work in St. Petersburg at his small theater called the Not Big Drama Theater. His most recent work, according to Pesochinsky, is a version of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" that maintains the "tragic volume" of the original despite being set in the modern world.

Another trend of interest is a boom in innovative puppet theater for adults. This has come about as a result of a group of students taught by Ruslan Kudashov. They have taken on such disparate literary sources as the plays of William Shakespeare, Yevgeny Zamyatin's famous anti-utopian novel "We," and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Also in the works is a puppet show based on the songs of Russian rock musician Alexander Bashlachyov.

Finally, Pesochinsky points out that Lev Dodin continues to impress and delight his audiences at the world-famous Maly Drama Theater. Dodin's "traditional Russian psychological theater still has many admirers," Pesochinsky concludes.

To  all of Nikolai Pesochinsky's comments, check out the video at the beginning of  article.