The season's most dazzling performance? Yevgeny Mironov's in Shukshin's Stories.

Not since the days of his brilliant Lopakhin has Yevgeny Mironov been ... in such fine form.

How a human being, albeit a fabulous actor trained to the nth degree, is able to speak in entirely different voices, to alter completely the inflection patterns of his speech, how can his bearing, his walk, his mannerisms change in the blink of an eye – this is a mystery most profound.

In the story The Microscope, the actor transforms himself into a village intellectual, a henpecked loser in a goofy outfit – a feat quite unexpected for those familiar with Yevgeny Mironov's acting style. ... And so it goes throughout the performance: the actors demonstrate abilities unsuspected even by their most attentive and perceptive audiences.

The performance of the Moscow artists truly astonishes: Mironov's brilliant physicality, Khamatova's outstanding characterization.
The acting ensemble, starring – without question – Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova, is synergetic, expressive, and basking in the possibilities offered by the text and the director's ingenuity. One of Mironov's tumultuous dances alone is worth [the price of admission]!
It is just possible that the fate of the 2009 Golden Mask award for Best Actor is sealed. It will go to the bunch of eccentrics portrayed by Yevgeny Mironov.

In the opening story, the headliners – who happen to be the two top representatives of their generation of actors, Chulpan Khamatova and Yevgeny Mironov – move aside for their younger colleagues. ... As the hoary grandfather, Mironov actually lies with his back to the audience the whole time, bawling drunken tunes of his younger days. ... Lovestruck young husbands, grumpy old men watching their children, their strength, their lives leave them – all his incarnations are equally inspired. Mironov is at his peak.

The spotlight here is on the actors. Hermanis's got eight of them, all excellent, but the two stars and crowd favorites – Mironov and Khamatova – outshine the rest. For Yevgeny Mironov, the proceedings basically turn into a one-man show: the range of emotions and personalities he gets to exhibit onstage would normally require three or four different productions. ... Styopka alone, where ... Mironov plays ... a man who escapes from prison three months before his release ... and Khamatova is his loving deaf sister, ... would be enough for the duo to merit a serious award, yet that story is only one of ten.

Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova demonstrate a brilliant ability to instantly create a juicy portrait – and then another, and a third... ... The mosaic forms a suite – the staging follows the rules of a musical composition. And we know that of all the earthly joys only love is greater than music, but love, too, is a melody – one that ... is carried here by the pure heavenly voices of Khamatova and Mironov.
Superstars Chulpan Khamatova and Yevgeny Mironov ... have demonstrated genuine miracles of transformation.
No one here is more believable than Yevgeny Mironov. ... Penetrating to the very essence of his characters, the actor uses no makeup, yet his ever-changing face, body and voice create the astonishing impression of a role being born before the viewers' eyes.

Yevgeny Mironov, who appears in all ten tales, sweeps out of one role and into the next without deviating from the solo lead assigned to him by Hermanis. His heroes – lost, lonely, vulnerable, torn to pieces, driven mad by love, and funny as all hell – hear music inaudible to the rest of us, and they try to tell us about it as best they can: by singing, dancing, doing the laundry, buying absurdly expensive boots, escaping from jail. And the musicality of Mironov himself, whose every character lives, breathes and moves to his own inimitable rhythm, makes it a breathtaking spectacle.
Yevgeny Mironov's dashing hoofery and the atomic energy of his instant shapeshifting ... dazzle with their virtuosity ... . Hermanis equates the passions of Shukshin's eccentrics with Mironov's passion for the stage – a genuine passion that produces the raw unfeigned energy of a happiness to be alive here and now.

Yevgeny Mironov is not just awesome. He is the incarnation of great acting. Ten stories equal ten [different] characters. ... Mironov plays the Shukshin game vividly, merrily, movingly. Artfully balancing on the brink of outright buffoonery, he forces the audience to cry with laughter and shed the quiet bittersweet tears of catharsis.

When Mironov and Khamatova let it rip ..., what materializes in front of our eyes is an inspired hymn to the exuberant, waggish buffoonery that is theater, a triumph of the great comic principle that seriously threatens to split our proverbial sides. True protagonists of the production and indisputable nominees for best couple of the theatrical season, the two actors, justly regarded as the leading representatives of the craft among their generation, have clearly missed this performing style, footloose and reckless almost to a fault: they bite into it with crackling gusto, reaching the very pinnacles of the comedic art. But for all that, their professionalism allows them to never for a moment step out of character, never to lose track of the play's meaning and of their ... ultimate objectives.

The entire cast of Shukshin's Stories is magnificent, but the real tour de force belongs to Yevgeny Mironov, whose work in the theater has not been this compelling for some time. Moving from character to character, changing ages, body shape and vocal qualities, he gives a rollicking, zesty, yet tender performance that will not allow your eyes to wander off for long even when he is not active in a scene.

The sparkplug for Shukshin's Stories was, of course, Mironov. Suffice it to say that, as a sick old grandfather, he spent the entire first scene ... with his back to the audience – and the old man came off as just about the most striking character.

Using no makeup but changing beyond recognition, alternating flowered shirts and discarding a beret for ... a pair of taped-up glasses, Mironov brings out a whole string of Shukshin's villagers. ... Now he breaks into a furious dance, now a song, capturing with a single cry or gesture a moment of heartbursting happiness – to be inevitably followed by despair, a hangover, or a prison sentence.

Yevgeny Mironov, whose work always thrills the heart, played a different character in each story – and played them in a way that left no doubt: yes, it's the Altay villager, the genuine article. One awaited each new incarnation with bated breath and joyful anticipation.

The director gives his performers such freedom, such space for improvisation, that all one can do is envy the way they relish the chance to frolic in public, to show-and-tell so many sad and funny tales with juicy flair. The unequalled leader of this artful romp is, of course, Yevgeny Mironov.

The cast did not let us down. Granting Mironov's unchallenged and entirely justified supremacy (his genius comes bursting out, like it or not), every actor was in the right place at the right time.
The pairing of Khamatova and Mironov astonished with its organic harmony.
The second story, Boots, launches the alliance of Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova. ... I haven't seen a better stage duet for some time. They feel each other as if they've been teamed up for years, they show off to each other with a cascade of filigreed gestures – electricity fairly crackles between them. Here, Mironov's unfailing but sometimes aloof professionalism acquires ... a fierce intensity.

In this production, Yevgeny Mironov ... performs a herculean labor, playing the lead in all ten of the short stories. At first he nearly gets sidetracked into a one-man show – the sort of intoxicating histrionics that hark back to the '90s, when he and teacher Oleg Tabakov used to cut loose on the stage of the Tabakerka. But very soon the gambol becomes a masterly solo, the likes of which this outstanding actor has not favored us with in a while. Without makeup, without excessively "colorful" touches, but with the light-handed, slightly ironic simplicity of a watercolor sketch, he easily attains the youthful forte, the elderly piano, the tragedy, the farce, the naïveté. He sings and he dances; he speaks and he pauses; he breaks into adroit pantomime. The undisguised delight and the almost boyish verve with which ... Mironov ... works makes one most optimistic.

The leitmotif is conducted by ... Yevgeny Mironov. It's hard to say where he's more impressive – playing a country bumpkin who invests in a microscope, a simple young lad in love with a floozy, a blind accordion player, or a mute girl's brother who escapes from jail. Wearing sneakers, printed shirts or trousers that reach up to his underarms, his hair tousled or slicked back, he is immersed in the Shukshin spirit and performs with mastery and profound professionalism. Mironov's acting is, as always, finely tuned.

Yevgeny Mironov has lucked out the most. Hermanis has finalized the actor's theme, genre and stage persona by offering him the chance to play a whole picture-gallery of cranks and holy fools. Mironov does so with expressive, striking virtuosity and in complete accord with the director's aesthetic.

Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova are ... the stars of the show, which does not mean they're only there for decorative purposes. Playing the leads in this multistory vehicle is exhausting work that involves slapstick, impersonation, emotionally intense drama and just plain physical exertion.

The most diligent collector of Shukshin's "types" turns out to be Yevgeny Mironov. Words cannot describe how the actor changes from a young man into an old one and back again – right before our eyes and without the help of makeup. For each character, Mironov finds the perfect set of mannerisms that bespeaks a gift for instant physical transformation.

The dazzle of Broadway and the versatility of London's West End, European craftsmanship, Russian verve, and their very own athletic limberness – this is Chulpan Khamatova and Yevgeny Mironov's performance in Shukshin's Stories. It is a performance ... that has made the ten tales the biggest hit of the season ..., one whose artistry shines against the tawdry backdrop of Moscow's other independent productions – and against that of some of the two stars' other shows and films, whose mediocre direction made their work appear either superior to the director's or below their own standards.

Chulpan Khamatova and Yevgeny Mironov, transfiguring themselves from story to story, merge with the language of Shukshin, become its derivative, as if the prose took root in them and is sprouting anew on their lips. They change costumes and makeup but could really do without – there is nothing they can't germinate from within themselves.
The duet [of Chulpan Khamatova and Yevgeny Mironov] is a celebration for our stage, which has had nothing to celebrate for a long time.

The work of Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova makes Hermanis' production a theatrical event in the most literal sense. The actor's theater, which is undergoing a crisis on the contemporary European stage, has received an enormously weighty argument in favor of its continued existence and development.

Each character is portrayed with amazing intensity, sincere love, and an unrelenting hunger for transformation and pure play. In every case Yevgeny Mironov manages not just to show yet another human type, but to capture its very essence. The actor works with total concentration, every moment onstage is vital to him – yet he is completely free and at ease. Every act is as convincing as it is unpredictable, astonishing in its inspired precision. It's nothing for Mironov to make the audience howl with laughter – and freeze with a lump in its throat the very next second. If before Shukshin's Stories one could still doubt that Yevgeny Mironov was the number-one actor in Russia today, now it requires no further proof.

Mironov's work in The Oresteia, The Cherry Orchard, certainly the Valery Fokin stagings, was nothing like this. Those had been performances significant for the candor and intensity of the actor's unfeigned passions, the exhausting, perhaps hazardous profundity of his emotional investment. It was as if he'd reclaimed the threadbare adage about art as self-sacrifice and made it his very own motto. ... [But] control over viewers' sensibilities may be had at a much lower personal cost – which Shukshin's Stories has demonstrated brilliantly. This is the show that justifies a progressive, European-minded theater critic's calling Yevgeny Mironov a superlative artist in the very latest style. ... "I felt like I was holding a Stradivarius," said Hermanis about working with Mironov. No kidding. The only question [was] whether Hermanis' dramatic suite in fact required instruments that were this close to perfection, and if he knew how to handle such instruments. ... Hermanis and Mironov have put together a spectacle from which it incredibly, illogically, but irrefutably follows that Russia – such as it is, with all its miseries, hardships and, in Shukshin's words, "unthinkably arduous victories" – is a place where one can live lightly and pleasantly. And that's something that warrants more than compliments – they each deserve a medal and a monument.
This ensemble production, which features wonderful work by many actors, is at same time Yevgeny Mironov's benefit performance. ... The toughest critics' analysis of his work is simple, and they say it straight out: our contemporary ranks among the greatest actors of all time.


[Translated by Vlada Chernomordik for the Yevgeny Mironov Official Website]