Gardenia. Theatre. Pushkin. Press about the performance. "Gardenia" at the Pushkin Theater leads from intimate memories to discussions about the family and history of Elzhbet Khovanets Gardenia

In the middle of last summer, the Theater. Pushkin announced a laboratory for directors, who were expected to submit sketches of small-form performances for a branch of the theater. Among the requirements - the number of characters is not more than eight and, if possible, a ready-made casting from the theater troupe. The first performance that entered the repertoire at the end of the laboratory was Elzbieta Khovanets' Gardenia staged by Semyon Serzin.

Four women are sitting in a row: an aristocrat from the past with curls and a fox boa on her shoulders (Alexandra Ursulyak), a half-boy with a slicked short haircut and metal in her eyes (Anastasia Lebedeva), a red-haired rebel in a tutu and a leather jacket (Elmira Mirel), an office intellectual in fashionable trousers seven-eighths (Natalya Reva-Ryadinskaya). In turn, they recall: how my mother went to a parent meeting and found out that her daughter was not doing well at all, how her mother advised the offending hooligans from school to be beaten, how her mother and grandmother found out that her daughter was suddenly expecting a baby at 22, and took her to the antenatal clinic ... At this moment, the hall, which seems to have grown so tired from, apparently, the real memories of the actresses (and who doesn’t have such stories?), is almost touched - the last story is told by Ursulyak, who recently gave birth (the actress played the first performances noticeable in position). At this moment, the transition from a non-fictional prologue to the text of the young Polish playwright Elzbieta Chovanets begins. Her play "Gardenia", on the one hand, is a fairly typical attempt to sort things out with all the good and bad that the word "mother" has for you. And on the other hand, Gardenia, named after a flower from traditional wedding bouquets, as befits a modern Polish play, deals with issues of national identity and, with the help of the history of one family, reflects on the history of the country - from World War II to the present.

A young St. Petersburg director, a graduate of Veniamin Filshtinsky, Semyon Serzin, puts on this play a performance of rare simplicity and accuracy, in which each role turns out to be a benefit in the best sense of the word and provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the actresses of the troupe. Minimalistic scenery, solo microphones with a camera broadcasting a portrait of the actress on the back - the director focuses on the difference in the heroines and gives the actresses the opportunity to turn around in this difference.

Ursulyak plays a great-grandmother, a woman alone (in Khovanets, the heroines are simply numbered). Taken in by a Jewish couple, married to a handsome Polish officer and given birth to a German officer. Having lost both her parents, her husband, and, it seems, herself, she raises her unloved daughter and becomes an inveterate drunkard - very aristocratically. Woman one Ursulyak is the exact opposite of the performances of Yuri Butusov that glorified the actress. Here the actress is the embodiment of softness, delicacy and charm, seasoned with a gap of irony.

Her daughter, woman two, is an iron soldier. In Lebedeva, who plays the miserly hard worker as practically the embodiment of the ideal Aryan, it is impossible to recognize the girl with bloodied legs from The Good Man from Sezuan. Woman two is the embodiment of gray post-war Poland, in which you have to survive.

Elmira Mirel, a woman of three, is either a punk or a hippie informal girl, drinking and carousing on the money earned by her miserly mother, Poland at the moment of change. And her daughter, a woman of four (Reva-Ryadinskaya), is the embodiment of today's unified world, where they meditate on the forgiveness of their parents, buy housing in new areas and work in large companies.

It hardly makes sense to specifically and in detail prove that a woman, due to the exclusivity of her nature and her destiny, reacts sharper and more accurately to what happens to herself, to her loved ones, in the society in which she and her relatives live. Therefore, it is obvious that at the basis of literature and art, as a rule, the fate of women is primarily revealed, in their specificity, tragedy, eccentricity and with the resonance that is associated for the reader, the viewer with the story of a particular woman revealed to him, which reveals the work art. This is a kind of tuning fork of social life, something that, in a collected, sometimes harsh and tragic form, conveys the given time and its peculiarity in comparison with what was before and will be after.

That's why family stories are so instructive. Especially when only a woman becomes their center. Especially and above all, just when the women themselves, in the images of their heroines, talk about what can touch both the soul and the heart of the audience. For example, the way it happened with the play "Gardenia" by the Polish author Elzbieta Chovanets (Russian text by Irina Adelheim).

Transfer excursions

2. Live like a human

The performance "Gardenia" is being staged at the Pushkin Moscow Theater for the tenth month (its premiere took place in early May 2017). But it is played as if you were present at the premiere show: easy, uninhibited, simple and, it just seems so, almost artless. The amazing theatricality of coexistence in the chamber in every sense of the space of the Small Stage of the capital's theater is so organic and confidentially presented to the audience that, noticing, you perceive it as a matter of course for the story of the life of four generations of women of the same Polish family - from the pre-war time to almost the present day ( dates appear on the white screen of the backdrop, which, like the chapters of a prose work, begin a story about what happened to its heroes in decades; and the last number was the year 2007, but it is clear that the story is about how they cope with their misfortunes , with domestic and everyday troubles, these ladies, clearly does not stop at this date.)

Everything starts off happily. Woman 1 (Alexandra Ursulyak, playing the grandmother) recalls what preceded her marriage to an officer. And woman 4, her great-granddaughter performed by Natalya Reva-Ryadinskaya, says that, despite all the ups and downs of troubles and hardships, disappointments and losses, everything is going well in her life. She has an excellent education, a good job, she is satisfied with life, because she also has a friend. Only now he is in no hurry to marry, although woman 4 is pregnant. And, as it turns out, she is waiting for a girl, that is, the female story will continue in the next generation, having absorbed into her heredity and spiritual memory everything that happened to her grandmother, her daughter (Anastasia Lebedeva, playing woman 2), her daughter (Elmira Mirel , playing the role of Women 3). Everything that the representatives of four generations of one family have experienced will become the present and future of the one that has yet to be born. Despite the fact that already her birth is preceded by some fatal predestination - it is not known, after all, her father wants to become such officially and in fact.

Here it is important to clarify that women, as Elzbieta Khovanets described them and director Semyon Serzin opened to the attention of the audience, are fatally, one might say, unlucky. Or rather, they could not contain their own happiness.

My grandmother wanted to marry a Polish officer, but she grew up in a poor family. Jewish neighbors helped her with the arrangement of the wedding, but this did not last too long - her happy being in marriage. The Nazis came to Poland, and, of course, to Babushka's hometown, Krakow. The grandmother’s potential husband became an underground worker, and she carried out specific assignments that once led to pregnancy from an SS man.

And by the nature of her character, and because of her love for a beautiful life, and then - as a result of her or because of parting with her husband - because of alcoholism, they led to her further loneliness. Which did not at all brighten up the presence of a loved one nearby (moreover, the grandmother did not love her own daughter so much that not only from adolescence she imposed adult cares about the house with harsh reprisals for dereliction of duty, but also treated her with hatred; whether because of for seeing in her a constant reproach for frivolous behavior in her youth, or because she gave birth to her from a man whom she could not love and who was an enemy, an inhuman.)

I must say that the daughter responded to her in the sense of hostility in return. But, being serious, practical and independent beyond her years, she married early the one who came to hand. She did not experience much joy from family life, but she gave birth to a daughter. The husband, however, was ill all the time and did not particularly bring money home, although he nevertheless somehow tried to work. So, the grandmother's daughter had to take care of her, and her husband, and her daughter, a hundred made her angrier, more assertive and confident in her constant personal rightness.

She also gave birth to a daughter, whom she tried to raise strictly. And everything would be fine if not for the influence of her grandmother, who sometimes stayed with her if her mother had to go on business. (What kind of upbringing it was can be judged by the scene when the grandmother teaches her granddaughter to play cards, naturally, beats her, takes the money she has set aside, and then drinks it away in front of acquaintances and strangers.)

Naturally, her daughter treated her grandmother with the sharpness of an unloved person. And, since everything in the house and not only was on her, on the one that she herself gave birth to, she had neither time nor energy left. In the end, the grandmother’s lesson benefited her (in the opposite sense): the money that she saved up - a thousand zlotys, and what her mother saved for moving to another apartment, she paid the young man to sleep with her. In due time, she gave birth to a daughter again, not paying attention to her or her husband, spending time in parties and drinking bouts. But the grandmother's granddaughter, unexpectedly for everyone or in defiance of everyone and everything - people and circumstances - has grown up to be quite a decent, responsible and thinking about the future modern girl. Yes, everything would be fine, only again it turns out that something is not going well with marriage. It doesn’t work out like people do - with a ceremony in a church, with the words of a priest, with gardenia branches (a plant that symbolically gave the name to the performance - being, including decorative, it requires very careful care, which is comparable to how men related to women who literally spoke through memories of what their not-too-happy life had been until now).

But still, the great-granddaughter got out into the people. And, probably, this is a family quality - in spite of everything to cope with difficulties, always fight troubles and rely only on one's own strength in order to live no worse than others.

And this is provided that each of the four women - with character. A grandmother with the charisma of a secular lady, all in the feeling of a holiday and possible joy in everyday life according to her strength and means. Her daughter is assertive, adamant, with principles and self-confidence. Her daughter, like a grandmother with some frivolity, but also elegance, practicality in a mother. And just as careless as my grandmother. And the youngest is a disciplined, self-made in the European-American sense of the word, but not without some of the romanticism of her great-grandmother now, a sweet and quiet girl-woman.

Not only by kindred feelings, therefore, but also by the fact that there is not even predestination, but a sense of worldly discomfort transmitted from generation and a desire to cope with it, to overcome it - all this connects four lonely women for various reasons into that unity that unites them into a single whole. They are lonely in their essence, whether they have husbands or not, because both when they rely only on themselves, efforts and means, and when there is a man next to them - a husband or cohabitant, which turns out almost the same thing - they wait love, hope for it, strive for it to the extent that they understand it and the essence of women's destiny. Therefore, given as if from the beginning, loneliness, as if the complete absence of a way out of everyday problems, attempts not to think about them, each to live in pleasure and for the benefit of only the ego - reconcile them in difficult, almost always tragic, on the verge of scandal, reproaches and disagreements of coexistence. Oddly enough, it was in it that their happiness turned out to be for them, what seems to them the norm and the usual correct from their point of view and according to the neighbors, of the circle that is priority for them, life.

It would seem that real dramas unfold before the eyes of the audience of the Small Stage, are indicated without embellishment and attempts to somehow get around them. But with all this, the play "Gardenia" turned out to be optimistic, sometimes even a little comical, naturally, with a tragic tinge, in some ways even inspired. Probably because by revealing what was the past for each of the women, it has become the present and has a future perspective - distant or not, as it turns out - they are freed from the unpleasant, say goodbye to him, of course, not forgetting what was. First of all, that with all their disagreements - they are women, they are close people. And together it is easier for them because, let's say, that they can, when necessary, after listening to reproaches, get help from the elders among them. Or - vice versa, from the younger ones.

And it is very characteristic that, sitting at the table, which became the concept of the scenery of the performance "Gardia" and a symbol of the way not arranged in everything, but at home, like four identical chairs, they sing a fragment of "Mama" from the Bohemian Rhapsody of the group "Queen". And a hit with a meaning for each name, sung a cappella so harmoniously that the soul rejoices, and this is the essence of what Semyon Serzin staged the play Gardenia about - that you need to cherish those who are nearby. At a minimum, of course, if warmer or friendlier relations do not develop.

This number, which is performed by women sitting at the table and looking into the hall, with enthusiasm, purely, from the heart, with full dedication - almost pop, if it were so effectively and justifiably theatrical, elegantly and stylishly completing what the St. Petersburg director invented and implemented young generation Semyon Serzin.

And the play "Gardenia" began with a confidential intonation. Alexandra Ursulyak, Anastasia Lebedeva, Elmira Mirel, Natalya Reva-Ryadinskaya (each represented by the exact costume, emphasizing the character, the essence of the played image - costume designer Pavel Nikitin), came to the fore, which is practically an illusion in such a small hall, settled down on chairs, and began to tell a story from life. Acting, but still close to the verbatim genre. And it was not immediately clear why in the performance, translated from Polish, there are Moscow realities in any meticulousness of the situations and details described.

In fact, this was also a prologue to the performance, and the performances that had already begun, and real stories from the childhood memories of each of its heroines. That is, personal, transformed into theatrical. For some reason, all of them, the stories seemed to be conflicts with mothers (only Elmira Mirel noticed that she had problems with her father, therefore she would not tell anything about her mother). For some reason they happened in winter. And for some reason ended with a conflict with a loved one. Anastasia Lebedeva, by no means in terms of seniority within the framework of the subordination of the heroines of the play, spoke about how her mother, who worked at several jobs, came to the school for a parent meeting. And after him, she hit her daughter for lying, for academic failure. Alexandra Ursulyak found it necessary to mention how she traveled with her mother and grandmother to the other end of the city to get an appointment with a doctor at the antenatal clinic, who was familiar to the older women of her family. And Natalya Reva-Ryadinskaya took pity on her mother, a doctor by education and vocation, most likely, who suffered from her daughter's constant colds and tried to protect her from diseases, and it turned out - from childhood, the usual joys of early age.

Then all four take their places in different parts of the stage. And the performance, based on the text of Elzbieta Chovanets, begins, as it were, on the second attempt, although heart-to-heart conversations among themselves and for the audience were already such from the very beginning. First of all, because the director, together with the artists, chose from their children's worldview what described the conflict, and what carefully and exactly corresponded to what the four women chose bit by bit and important moments from their lives.

So naturally and delicately Semyon Serzin set the perspective of the performance "Gardenia" - the distance between the present and what once was such for each of the heroines.

The foreshortening has become here at the same time a technique, spectacular and clear in every detail.

Throughout the laconic in time, however, meaningful and capacious in meaning and subtext of the performance, each of its participants approached the proscenium. And into the microphone, again, as on a stage, she reported what she considered the most necessary of what happened to her once, a very long time ago. Or very recently.

The camera was pointed at the actresses at that moment. And their story was duplicated, enlarged image, on the white back screen. It turned out again the distance between what was said in the hall, and what arose as a reflection of words, feelings, and thoughts. The close-up of the faces did not interfere with the game, since the impression was created that the game did not seem to be here, although, of course, it could not have been in a theatrical performance. But it was so softly expressed, so natural in facial expressions, in intonations, that it became a clear continuation of those stories that four women had previously turned into the hall, talking about what had happened to them. Off stage and in reality.

Such stage presence created a multi-valued and concrete effect of presence. Both artists and spectators. When you see and hear the one that stands next to the seated spectators and is also on the screen, the image does not double, but acquires a special fullness and expressiveness.

It turned out to be convincing also because it reminded of Polish cinema of the post-war period. Typically black and white, even when shot on color film. And because the colors there were perceived as faded, and because most often Polish films are sad with some kind of inner feeling of pain and suffering. But not only the projection of the monologues of the actresses gives the performance "Gardenia" the necessary national flavor within reasonable limits. This is also the song of Jerzy Petersbursky (his last name is written differently in Russian) “Last Sunday”, a sad explanation of why a young man cannot come to terms with the fact that the girl he loves preferred another. The song itself, known in Russia as the tango "Tired Sun", surprisingly developed the leitmotif of the fate of women who, by the will of circumstances and life convictions, did not find true happiness. And besides, accompanying the performance with a detail, a hint of national color, it strengthened the connection between the personal for the actresses and what is said in the work of Elzbieta Chovanets, where the biography of the composer, the author of the music also acquired a symbolic and incoming expressive nuance, a touch of the moment in the flesh and fabric of this performance.

Undoubtedly, the brilliant St. Petersburg teacher Filshtinsky, who turned 80 last year, in the “Inner Circle” program of the Culture channel (hosted by Anatoly Malkin), said in his hearts and, probably, not without regret, that in Moscow they don’t know how to put on performances. Having in mind, most likely, that in his understanding, in what Stanislavsky wanted to embody at the theater, a theatrical production is not an illustration of some text that is prosaic or dramatic in nature, but a kind of habitation, its embodiment according to the laws of the theater. And nothing else.

Semyon Serzin, who staged "Gardenia" at the Moscow Pushkin Theater and another performance, which, having appeared earlier, could qualify for the All-Russian Theater Award "Golden Mask", presented to the metropolitan audience what a real theater is. Sincere, professional, filled with images and realities, impeccable in form, which with amazing skill conveys the content of a literary work taken for interpretation.

Here it is enough for woman 2 to rhythmically knock on the table, sitting opposite woman 1, as it is clear that we have a Krakow-Gdansk train in front of us, and the table at which two women are sitting, showing deliberate dissatisfaction with each other in communication, is his car. Woman 2 passes on to woman 3, and that woman 4, like a baton - a red, harshly even a red knitted cap. And, just putting it on, each then begins to remember about life, standing in front of the microphone. This is by no means a fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood (or, in the original, takes it), it turns out, although it is also about a grandmother, mother and granddaughter. And about a certain symbol of the baton, transmitted from one to the other over and over again, like a common pain, a fatal predisposition to grief and trouble.

There are many such remarkable, completely everyday and essentially theatrical details in Gardenia, if not to say that the whole performance, staged as if in one breath by Semyon Serzin, is such a detail, something that gives all the heroines of his strength and confidence that that any troubles and obstacles can be resisted - together or separately. But it’s better to be together, so as not to be completely lonely and restless mentally with the appearance of well-being, at least nominal and understandable to others, to public opinion, which somehow, albeit in different ways, affects the worldview of each of the heroines of Gardenia .

Being translatable in its essence, this performance, laconic, kind and sensitive to the feelings of people, seems to be an international statement. Based on the bitter history of Poland, including in the twentieth century, keeping the details as a local color, he talks about what is international, what is understandable, being a story about striving for an ideal, about losses, including in the spiritual plan. It is about what is understandable in translation so much that it seems authentic, accessible with such a theatrically reflexive argumentation, in such a reading, which is perceived as an original transposition of someone else's experience into the language of another people. Remaining original in details, supranational in its essence and drama, the fact that it cannot remain without a counter wave of acceptance and empathy from the audience.

. Gardenia at the Pushkin Theater leads from intimate memories to discussions about family and history ( Vedomosti, 20.09.2017).

Gardenia. Theatre. Pushkin. Press about the play

Kommersant, May 11, 2017

Polish Rhapsody

"Gardenia" at the Pushkin Theater

A branch of the Moscow Pushkin Theater showed the premiere of the play "Gardenia" based on the play by the Polish playwright Elzbieta Khovanets directed by Semyon Serzin. By Roman Dolzhansky.

The performance of the young St. Petersburg director Semyon Serzin is the fruit of laboratory work: there is practically no actual dramaturgy in the repertoire of the Pushkin Theater, so several young directors were invited to make sketches of performances based on modern texts. And it was precisely "Gardenia" that was decided to be turned into a repertoire performance: a chamber play for four actresses in the chamber space of a branch of the Pushkin Theater looks appropriate and sounds distinct.

The play by Elzbieta Chovanets is the story of four generations of women from the same family. Monologues and dialogues in Gardenia are emphatically private, personal, but, of course, the history of women is inextricably linked with the history of Poland, and each of the heroines corresponds to a certain period in the life of the country (it is important that most of the action of the play does not take place anywhere, but in Krakow, that is, in a city that is a symbol of national identity).

In the list of characters, the women are simply numbered. The first of them was taken in by a childless Jewish couple - her adoptive parents were victims of the Holocaust, she herself married a Polish officer, but became pregnant by a German officer. Her daughter can be considered the personification of socialist Poland: semi-poverty, gray everyday life and forced indifference to everything. The granddaughter embodies post-communist changes and the long-awaited freedom, which is difficult to use properly. Finally, the great-granddaughter is modern Poland, where capitalism develops, you can earn money and rationally plan your career.

Of course, one can watch Gardenia without regard both to social allegories and to the context of modern Polish drama, in which (re)thinking of recent history, the theme of historical predestination and national destiny occupy almost the main place. After all, "Gardia" (a flower that was invariably woven into wedding bouquets in the family) is primarily women's stories in which the audience, predominantly consisting of women, will always find echoes of their own experiences, regardless of times and places about which it's on stage. To emphasize this closeness, as well as the universality of the topics covered, Serzin even came up with a prologue in which four actresses, seated in a row in front of the audience, tell stories, apparently from their own lives, for starters. A documentary (well, pseudo-documentary) prologue should ease the transition of actresses to their roles. And at the same time, to emphasize once again that we are still talking about the actual theater.

From there, from the arsenal of relevance, there is a microphone and a back-video screen, on which the camera broadcasts the faces of the actresses during their monologues. As a matter of fact, sound amplification and projection add little, because in a tiny hall the actresses already play close-ups all the time. And these four individualities are the main thing that is in the play. Each of the heroines of Gardenia dreams that her life will be happier and more reasonable than her mother's. In the play, one can see the theme of fate, predestination, which seems to generate, reproduce misfortune. But in the play, the bet is reasonably placed on the difference in temperaments, types and characters.

The great-grandmother of Alexandra Ursulyak appears as a lady from the past - with manners and pretensions, a little adventurous, a little drinking aristocrat. Her daughter, performed by Anastasia Lebedeva, is a little "fascist" in a children's military uniform and with slick, bleached hair. Elmira Mirel's granddaughter is an informal girl in a leather jacket and with a mop of reddish hair. Finally, the great-granddaughter of Natalia Reva-Ryadinskaya is a man of the times of corporate ethics, dress code and unified emotionality. The characters of the performance are not slaves of time, they do not depict aging and are completely independent of everyday details and signs of the era. And only in the last scene, when all four gather at the table, the flesh of everyday life appears - flour, water, dough, meat in a meat grinder - but, as it turns out, only in order to part with the audience to the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen. that what is shown is not a hopeless tragedy, but just a game.

Vedomosti, September 20, 2017

Elena Smorodinova

family bouquet

Gardenia at the Pushkin Theater leads from intimate memories to discussions about family and history

Director Semyon Serzin was able to turn a laboratory for four actresses into a spectator theater.

Four women sit in a row: an aristocrat from the past with curls and a fox boa on her shoulders (Alexandra Ursulyak), a half-boy with a slicked short haircut and metal in her eyes (Anastasia Lebedeva), a red-haired rebel in a tutu and a leather jacket (Elmira Mirel), an office intellectual in fashionable trousers seven-eighths (Natalya Reva-Ryadinskaya). In turn, they recall: how my mother went to a parent meeting and found out that her daughter was not doing well at all, how her mother advised the offending hooligans from school to be beaten, how her mother and grandmother found out that her daughter was suddenly expecting a baby at 22, and took her to the antenatal clinic ... At this moment, the hall, which seems to have grown so tired from, apparently, the real memories of the actresses (and who doesn’t have such stories?), is almost touched - the last story is told by Ursulyak, who recently gave birth (the actress played the first performances noticeable in position). At this moment, the transition from a non-fictional prologue to the text of the young Polish playwright Elzbieta Chovanets begins. Her play "Gardenia", on the one hand, is a fairly typical attempt to sort things out with all the good and bad that the word "mother" has for you. On the other hand, Gardenia, named after a flower from traditional wedding bouquets, as befits a modern Polish play, deals with issues of national identity and, with the help of the history of one family, reflects on the history of the country - from World War II to the present.

Her daughter, woman two, is an iron soldier. In Lebedeva, who plays the miserly hard worker as practically the embodiment of the ideal Aryan, it is impossible to recognize the girl with bloody legs from The Good Man from Sezuan. Woman two is the embodiment of gray post-war Poland, in which you have to survive.

In the finale, all four make dumplings and sing "Bohemian Rhapsody". Probably about the possibility of accepting both one's history and oneself. But it seems that it is about the ideal model of a modern spectator theater - with perfect casting, intelligibility of articulation of the theme and readiness to engage in dialogue with both those who are aware of cultural trends and those who have come from the boulevard.

Staged a play by a Polish playwright Elzbieta Chovanets Gardenia is the story of four generations of women from the same Polish family. The performance covers the period from the beginning of World War II to the present day, but focuses not so much on historical events as on the personal stories of the heroines played by,, and.

The emphasis on the personal is set in the prologue, when a quartet of actresses sit down in front of the viewer and begin to recall stories from their childhood. In each touching memory in its own way, a (most often strict) mother appears; only Mirel has a case with her father, and she decides not to tell him. Then the actresses are distributed around the stage room: a microphone, a table under a hanging lamp, a piano, a screen on the wall.

In the performance, men are also off-stage characters - ghosts from memories, partly to which the monologues Woman I, Woman II, Woman III and Woman IV turn. In turn, they come to the microphone and retell the difficult biographies that follow from each other. The face of the actress is broadcast on the screen, where it appears in black and white, as on the chronicle; some scenes are played out as visual, voluminous illustrations (Ursulyak and Lebedeva masterfully depict a quarrel between mother and daughter on the train at the table).

Similarly, three years ago, Serzin staged the play “ SASHBASH. Sverdlovsk - Leningrad and back”, which brought him a nomination for the Golden Mask. There, the biography of the rocker and the poet was bizarrely mixed. Alexandra Bashlacheva, the history of the Ural rock club, memories of student gatherings and the life of older citizens. Gardenias also work with heredity, personal space and - first of all - memory.

The dreamy Ursulyak was married shortly before the war, her husband went to the Polish Resistance, she helped him, gave birth to a child, after their journey they missed each other - and he formed a new family. Their daughter (hiding her eyes under Lebedev's red hat) grows up in contrast to her mother: strict, collected, self-confident and despising alcohol (the heroine Ursulyak eventually starts drinking). Her daughter (Elmira Mirel) also grows up in conflict with her mother - and takes over a lot from her grandmother: she is loving, plays the piano and does not part with the bottle. Her daughter (Reva-Ryadinskaya) is already a quiet and modern girl who is in no hurry to get married, and shares household obligations with her husband. Not only character patterns, similar and yet different, like gardenia flowers, like genes, but the shadow of tradition haunts the family. In the finale, four generations find themselves at the same table and begin to fuss about the wedding of the youngest woman, who did not even think about it.

Gardenias are both built on resistance to roots and the idea that sooner or later traditions will take their toll anyway. And in this contradiction, Serzin's performance very accurately and honestly preserves the nerve of not only personal tragedies, but also sweet and sour family relationships.

The laboratory of young directors at the Pushkin Theater has given the first results. The play by Semyon Serzin based on the play by the Polish author - Elzbieta Khovanets, translated by Irina Adelheim "Gardenia" is named after the beautiful flower.

Performance for women. There were many men in the hall, but still the content is more focused on women.

The performance begins with an interesting reception: four performers sat down in a row and began to tell stories from their lives, “about mother”. And only Elmira Mirel said that she had a story about her dad, but this is off topic, and therefore there will be no story!

In the center of the plot is the fate of four generations of women in one family. Great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and daughter pass the baton to each other: drunkenness, dissatisfaction with life, men, the ingratitude of their child, and so on. And how did it start? From the fact that the parents literally sold the child to a rich, childless Jewish couple. And then the Second World War!

Great-grandmother - Alexandra Ursulyak fought the Nazis, participated in the Resistance. Fur boa, gorgeous face, hairstyle, big prolific body… Regal posture and look!

Grandmother - Anastasia Lebedeva - an ever-changing image from a child smeared in her mother's lipstick to a teenager in a woolen hat (a kind of relay race symbol, they pass this hat to each other) and so on. This feature of Anastasia's acting talent I have long seen and admired.

Mother - Elmira Mirel also grows out of a child dangling polio legs, and, like a grandmother, pours wine over her problems. By the way, in this place it hit: “after the Soviet vaccine, I fell ill with polio.” At one time, the Soviet vaccine saved Japan from the polio epidemic, so there is no need for unnecessary horror!

Daughter - Natalya Reva-Ryadinskaya, seems to be showing a way out of this continuous relay race of discontent and scandals, drunkenness and dislike of the mother for her daughter, and the daughter for her mother. She "reads Hellinger" and "forgave her mother", but asserts that "a mother must forgive her mother" and so on. (After all, Hellinger says that children should not interfere in the affairs of adults, take them upon themselves, so this one is unlikely to succeed either.)

Each monologue is duplicated by a close-up of the actress's face on the back screen.

And the viewers gradually, over the next hour, begin to delve into this family genealogical history of four women. And in the end, when all four gather for a home celebration, pour flour, pour water, turn the meat for dumplings - absolutely without any "theatrical conventions", they talk about the upcoming wedding of the youngest of the women. She announces that she is pregnant. And everything again comes down to the fact that the elders shout that they loved their daughter, granddaughter so much, and she is ungrateful, and so on.

And I remembered D. Gabaldon's recent comment to one of the pieces of her new book from the Outlander series. What to talk about with children and what not to. The American writer believes that children should not be told what their life, health, upbringing cost you, you should not be forced to show sympathy for you for what you did or did not do to the child. It's not their concern.

A child's gratitude to parents is the ability to raise their children as worthy people. This is the result of your upbringing, that for which you did not sleep at night, and so on.

And in the end, when these women, who seem to love each other, again begin to yell, accuse and scandal, it’s just hysteria seizing the auditorium. Probably, after all, mostly women, because each one tries on the events taking place for herself: as a mother, as a daughter, as a survivor of the same thing or looking from the side and wondering, is it really possible ?!

This is probably the main message of the play: think about it! Break the vicious relay race!

And I fulfilled my idea. Blue hydrangea already after a year and a half (more!) Found Alexandra Ursulyak! I did give her a flower. A spectator sitting next to me said that my hydrangea attracts attention very much. And then I doubted, suddenly it was undignified to approach the artist with her! But the viewer agreed with me that this hydrangea is associated with Alexandra Ursulyak!
And Alexandra, when I approached her, was very happy, thanked her so sincerely that I was pleased with her look!

P.S. about the title of the show.
I wondered what kind of flower it was. Gardenia is an ornamental flower from the madder family. At home, it grows as a shrub. Homeland - Japan and China. Subtle, sensual and exotic.

But I'm not talking about that, but about the ubiquitous Outlander. Not only that, during the performance, I recalled Diana Gabaldon's thoughts about the fact that parents should not demand gratitude from their children and so on.

It turned out that the gardenia flower is named after the American doctor and naturalist of Scottish origin Garden (1730-1791). And the surname is "garden".

And as a reader of Outlander, it was interesting to learn from Wikipedia that this Garden was acquainted with the Bartrams father and son, Pennsylvania horticulturists and naturalists, John (1699 - 1777, "died last year," says Clare) and his son William (1739 - 1823).

That is, actually from Kingsessing near the glorious city of Philadelphia. And Claire is in Kingsessing, in the gardens of the Bartrams, and is finally reunited, body and soul, with her beloved husband Jamie Fraser, who has returned from the depths of the sea.