VAN GOGH FINDS ASYLUM REALITY

The Moscow Times
01.29.1998
John Freedman

Another Van Gogh..., a production of the Meyerhold Center and the Tabakov Theater, brings us yet another side of Valery Fokin.

This protean director has created a series of imaginative theatrical fantasies in the 1990s. Most have been based on the prose of such writers as Nikolai Gogol (A Hotel Room in the Town of N, after Dead Souls), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Karamazovs and Hell) and Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis). Less often he has staged traditional plays like Edvard Radzinsky's The Last Night of the Last Czar.

Another Van Gogh..., on the contrary, is an original piece by Fokin himself, devised with his longtime collaborator, the composer Aleksandr Bakshi. According to Fokin's own program note, the idea arose during rehearsals of The Karamazovs, when he visited a psychiatric ward with that show's leading man, Yevgeny Mironov.

But if Van Gogh differs in origin from Fokin's latest works, it continues the director's fascination with the uncommon, both in theme and style. Among other things, it asks the uncomfortable and quite contemporary question, are we better off for being cured of our neuroses? At its best, it tackles the issue with a stirring theatricality.

Amidst the ropes and pulleys lining the backstage walls, we see what appears to be a cage at center stage (designed by Aleksandr Borovsky). It is cocked at an angle and its inhabitants, inmates at an asylum, are frozen in awkward poses. A long, piercing alarm sounds and all but one of the inmates begin scratching the chain-link walls.

The figure closest to us (Yevgeny Mironov) – the one linking us, so to speak, with the others on stage – remains silent and motionless the longest. When the cage walls suddenly straighten out, and the front panel descends as a row of hospital beds, he will emerge as "another Van Gogh." He is an almost angelic patient who makes paintings that his abrasive mother (Yevdokia Ghermanova) collects and sells for a profit.

The action is a combination of real and imagined occurrences where the line between the two is utterly obliterated. A doctor's bed-check starts as a seemingly innocent foray, but transforms into something resembling an aesthetically organized riot. The doctor (Andrei Smolyakov) begins repeating his words as if he were a broken record, and that rhythm is picked up both in Bakshi's extraordinary humming, thumping and squeaking soundscape and in the wild cavorting of the inmates (choreographed by Nikolai Androsov).

The visit of "Van Gogh"'s mother also commences as a routine event. Pushy, caustic and slightly fearing her son, she quickly reveals in herself the kinds of phobias and delusions we are used to accepting as normal, while we, with her, are willing to recognize "Van Gogh"'s dazed retreat into himself as abnormal. This interlude, like every other in the show, eventually develops into an unbridled, ritualistic dance that, at least momentarily, frees everyone of the restraints – whether signs of civilized behavior or illness – that usually keep them in check.

The focal point of all of this is Yevgeny Mironov's beatific face. Whatever his character's disorder, this is a being who, through his creative impulses, maintains contact with the divine. Often restricted to working with his facial expressions and hands, the actor forges a moving portrait of one who commands his own sense of harmony, at least until he is subjected to a cure.

This show's triumphs are many: Mironov reconfirms his status as an actor of remarkable delicacy and depth; Bakshi integrates his eclectic, highly theatrical music into Fokin's creation with an ease and perfection that reminds one of the Michael Nyman-Peter Greenaway tandem in film; Fokin himself again proves he is a director of extraordinary vision.

If I have a complaint – could I not? – it is that the episodic show lacks a strong dramatic structure. Where Fokin is incomparable creating powerful and distressing images, he is less effective drawing a storyline that would dynamically unite those images. Also problematic are some of the dialogues by Ivan Saveliev. This promising young recipient of last year's Anti-Booker prize for drama makes his debut here in a professional show, although only as the author of selected dialogues. Where the exchange between "Van Gogh" and his mother is tough, pithy stuff, a later exchange between the doctor and mother about the nature of health and illness is so explanatory as to become trivial.

Such protests are minor asides, however. This is a challenging, probing inquiry into the complex relationships linking creativity, mental deviance and "normal" behavior.

Fokin is an artist, of course, and his task is to explore the problem, not solve it. But when the confused doctor marches off bitterly chanting the words "stress" and "tablets" just before "Van Gogh" is sedated, you can't help but wonder whether our Prozac- and psychologist-dominated age hasn't mistaken tranquility for well-being.