Through this unknown news from Tchekhov, the Russian director sometimes sometimes loses his audience along the way.
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“stop the war”: the injunction has registered in gigantic letters on a blood red background, on the wall of the Palais des Papes, at the end of the representation of the black monk, on this opening evening of the festival d ‘Avignon, Thursday July 7. And we do not know if the public got up to salute this call, the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov or his show, of an undeniable theatrical force. All this together, probably.
There is no question here of the invasion which ravages Ukraine but of another war, of another Faustian pact. From another crisis, another chaos, more intimate, more existential. Kirill Serebrennikov, 52, now exiled to Berlin after being prosecuted by the courts under false pretexts and under house arrest for two years, enters the Holy of the Holys of Avignon with Tchekhov, but a very special tchekhov.
This chekhov, which is close to Dostoyevski, is that of the black monk, one of the least known news of the master in France, but which, in Russia, is part of the collective imagination. The story is that of Andreï Kovrine, an overworked and depressed intellectual, who leaves to rest in the countryside with his friend Pessotski, who partially high, and his daughter Tania.
Pessotski is at the head of a magnificent area, a paradise of fruit trees and flowers, and the garden metaphor is at the heart of the news and the crisis that Kovrine crosses. Because, barely arrived in the countryside, the man is the object of strange hallucinations: a black monk appears to him, arose old legends, which keeps him this kind of words: “Being free is to be the elected, to serve the truth, to seek the truth, to be of those who will make humanity better (…). Freedom is perhaps only an illusion, but is not better to live in a large Illusion? Push freely in the wind, like a high rod, rather than multiplying like cold -resistant shrubs. “
Resistant shrubs here symbolizing the mediocrity of an ordinary and simple life, normalized as trees that we size and tutoring to give them a shape, opposed to the call of a higher life, more exhilarating and More dangerous, in an existential conflict that crosses all the work of Tchekhov. Conflict that will lead Kovrine on the shores of madness.
a graphic maelström
This news of twenty pages, Kirill Serebrennikov deployed it on a show of two and a half hours, in a large and powerful staging gesture, which digs the point of view of each of the characters. On the large plateau of the Court of Honor, where a Mistral well tuned with chaos were blowing, are installed three small Cahutians resembling greenhouses, which will recompose in different spaces during the representation.
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