Belgrade Drama Theatre, New stage
Author: Ivan Vyrypaev
Director: Anja Suša
Cast: Milena Pavlović, Daniel Sič, Ivan Tomić

A performance which makes you feel you have adopted a new worldview, and contemplating many topics is, in my opinion, a successful performance.

This is not a performance for a wide audience; this is an existentialist drama for strong individuals. Having seen this EXCELLENT work, I could not help but wonder why all the good performances in this country are pushed aside, while the ones with simple, cheerful and vulgar topics are in focus. I did not have to think for too long because I remembered one actress saying that she longs to play in good performances and not only in commercial ones.

This play by Ivan Vyrypaev, a contemporary dramaturge from Russia, who is in a constant search for sense, calls for an inner journey and contemplation about our life principles. Vyrypaev unremittingly explores social concepts which we a priori accept. Moreover, he makes us question the very principles we deeply trust.

The performance follows a very interesting concept – besides three actors, in the roles of John, God Arkady Ilyich, and Lot’s wife or Antonina Velikanova, “the main character is the text”, as stated by Vyrypaev himself. While actors are on stage, the audience has an opportunity to observe a projection on the screen, where the narrators lead us into the scenes in a creative way. The direction is excellent, the actors amazing, and the characters so multifaceted, amusing and authentic, that they take the audience through various feelings and psychological states ranging from tension, confusion, shock, to raucous laughter and tears.

I cannot help but notice allusions to Shakespeare. At the very beginning of Antonina’s speech, she informs the audience that she has decided to write something for theatre, “because, as Shakespeare said – “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”. I have come to understand what it means and I hope that the audience will share my views.”

Shakespeare is one of many authors and one of the best ones who have tried to deal with the truth of human soul. He always pointed out at new possibilities and new ways of life. Many authors followed him and refer to him- Ivan Vyrypaev is one of them. Just like Shakespeare, Vyrypaev wants to convey the message that there are always the ones who accept, support and abandon themselves to destructive systems, and the ones who don’t. He writes in a satirical and witty manner about individuals who lead different lives, who are atypical and capable of deep reflection about meaning and about themselves. His aim is to wake us up and make us think about the validity of imposed life patterns and the system of value forced on us by our birth in certain culture.
Vyrypaev plays a little with the difference between the point of view of the rational and the one of the mentally ill, in which mental patients, in this case Antonina Velikanova, keep searching for meaning, keep re-examining their inner state, lead internal monologues wishing to learn if there is “something else”. The omnipotent God, embodied by her doctor Arkady Iliych, keeps giving negative responses to her ideas, keeps denying everyone’s reality and, above all, erases all sensible notions from her memory reducing her to mere existence. The doctor-patient relationship resembles the character of Septimus from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, who often tends to refer to Shakespeare as well. In a similar manner, Ivan Vyrypaev wants to show that there is something malfunctioning in the system and in the order of things if the vigilance of mind and depth of feelings belong to a mentally ill person and not to a “healthy” one. Although Antonina Velikanova is ill, the audience persistently takes her side because they feel the primeval suffering and torture of a highly intelligent individual, a former Maths teacher, who is longing to understand the essence of everything.

Besides the humorous role of God Arkady Ilyich, the role of John the Prophet is filled with wittiness, Lynchian absurdity, and immeasurable depths. Between the scenes, John the Prophet peeps out of a TV set with his little accordion and plays his music very convincingly. Vyrypaev himself states that there are short comic rhymes inserted into the text, the so-called couplets by John the Prophet, which “should be performed between scenes in order to entertain the audience for otherwise this text, which has many tragic elements, might seem too heavy”.

The performance begins with a Shakespeare’s quote and ends with a Shakespearean message – one should not fear the warmth of the Sun. In one but last scene, when Antonina and Arkady Iliych literally sit in the rockets to go to the Sun, John the Prophet sings his last and the most comic couplet about the first female astronaut, and before it takes off, he tells us:

Fly where you want
But just
From your launch pad
In your rocket
For your own sake.

In an absolute confusion of all the ideas Vyrypaev entertained while writing this play, the audience, crying with laughter, greeted the actors with rounds of applause.

My personal impressions? Mixed, I’d say – I was exhilarated, puzzled by the play’s complexity, joyful due to all the laughter, and puzzled by many serious questions posed by the author. Just like Shakespeare used to do, Vyrypaev also invites us to sit in a metaphorical rocket and dare to fly to the burning Sun, i.e. to the point of our existence.

As the opening note by the author Ivan Vyrypaev clearly states – “the play’s main protagonist is the text”. What it means, is that the principal attention in the play Genesis No.2 is paid to the review of – in the spirit of “post-drama theatre” (H.T. Lehmann) – the traditional drama form and its principles – the representation, the narration, etc. The basis of that dramatic self-reflection is woven into the structure of the “play within a play”: a patient of a psychiatric hospital, Antonina Velikanova, writes a play and sends it to Vyrypaev himself, who appears as a dramatic persona, so that he can add “comic couplets” and his remarks. That is how we get a framework which resembles Russian nesting dolls – outside is the textual frame of Vyrypaev himself (in couplets and comments); inside of it are “dramatic situations” and the dialogue allegedly written by Velikanova (an imaginary character, of course) while in her texts there are some quotes inserted from the Bible.

Dramatic form is additionally problematized in the concept of space and characters. Space is divided into different wholes, all of which relate to a text level. Dramatis personae are also fragmented and multiplied and, again resembling nesting dolls, include two to three interconnected aspects; for example – “actor playing God (Arkady Ilyich)” … Here, it is necessary to point out that this interlacing of various narrative streams and various aspects of characters doesn’t seem like a serious and thorough poetic principle, which would correspond to postmodern literature, but more like a cynical, reckless and frivolous – game. Therefore, if we are to indulge in pretentious formulations, we could call this text a post-dramatic disintegration of postmodern drama.

The performance in Belgrade Drama theatre shows that the directress Anja Suša was basically concerned with the problematization of dramatic form or, rather, with critical re-examining (i.e. disintegration) of the illusionist theatre concept. That intent, in collaboration with the stage designer Marija Kalabić, has been carried out mostly through the space organization by setting up numerous stage signs which expose theatre mechanism: the stage for Velikanova’s play within a play marked out in dashed border (which can be seen as a sign of the fact that her text is virtual, existing only as an insert within another text), a curtained portal, a neon sign displaying Bolshoi Theatre, a separate point for comic couplets… This couplets point is made in an imaginative and layered manner, as it comes down to a small puppet stage in a TV without a screen, on which a Barbie doll and other tacky dolls perform.

This deepens the problem of presentation extending it from the world of theatre into the world of media and mass culture. The solution with the TV set and a Barbie doll is additionally signifying because it refers to the directress’s choice to play with the elements of popular culture, which originally is not one of the characteristic of the play Genesis No.2. Problematisation of the stage illusion reaches its climax in an imaginary situation which the directress places in the theatre (the lack of an elaborate dramatic situation made it necessary for the directress to invent almost all situations): the actors are sitting facing us, acting as if they are in the audience observing a play – Daniel Sič makes an excellent detailed creation of flatness, boredom making a smacking sound while sucking on a candy – which should probably question our comfortable position of passive theatre consumers. It rounds up the act of “theatre self-reflection and demystification”, which is being built up from the very beginning of the performance when, first the directress and then also other associates from the artistic and technical sector, read out stage instructions by Vyrypaev, displayed on the video-beam; that reading was, allegedly, the author’s strict condition if he was to allow the play to be performed.

Anja Suša demanded the actors to play in a way which would reveal theatre mechanisms. That approach is mostly noticed in Milena Pavlović’s acting which, clearly, precisely and in an disillusionary manner separates her presentation of the patient Velikanova (slouching posture, gloomy smile, pleading tone, and a generally reduced expression) and the presentation of the heroine of Velikanova’s play Lot’s Wife (more realistic and more expressive acting). On the other hand, Ivan Tomić has not managed to make a clear differentiation in style when it comes to various aspects of the character he is playing, trying to, somehow, “act non-acting”. Daniel Sič exceptionally sings the “comic couplets” filling his stylized acting (in Ivan the Fool manner) with powerful emotion.

However, although Daniel Sič’s acting leaves the most striking impression, it also points out at the most debatable feature of the directing. Namely, this vocal interpretation, followed by music by Vladimir Pejaković, creates a unique effect but also relativizes the importance of the text of the couplets; the particularly conspicuous is the one which, through a lascivious story about the sex between two men, disintegrates a pious Russian rustic idyll in a witty, daring and blasphemous manner. This is an indicator of a wider problem. The directress was mainly concerned with theatre research while Genesis No.2 or, to be more precise, the “play” by Velikanova which develops the universal theme of the search for meaning through the Biblical motif of Lot’s Wife, offers a possibility for deeper psychological, ethical and religious explorations. Theatre self-reflection and these complex life questions converge in the part of the text in which Velikanova, defending herself from accusations that her novel has no story, utters the key sentence: “Is it necessary to have something going on in order to feel tragedy?”