NEW DVDs! Plays-hits of the 1st decade! - «The Scenes near a Fountain»
«The Scenes near a Fountain» by Semen Zlotnikov recorded in 1989.
Digital re-mastering of video image and sound, and transfering into the system of the Dolby Stereo by «Ilkhom-Art Media»
«… Wealth of associative lines is typical for Zlotnikov’s drama. His characters propagate good and love for people slightly comically but sincerely. This is where the charm of his characters is. There move lots of various events, there is a scuffle in the ending where, for various reasons, and more often for no reason, all the characters take part. Finally they all find themselves on the tops of each other in a small fountain. Then, all of a sudden, from the beak of a bird standing in the fountain springs a thin water flow to wash and ‘clean’ the faces of the people». …I believe that Man in any circumstances must and can try to stay Man», - we may remember these words of Koshkin - Zlotnikiv’s character from the play. This is what this play is about. So is the ILKHOM’s performance.
Juliy Smelkov. Small Scenes/ILKHOM. Moscow, 1984
The history of «Scenes by a Fountain» happened to be unusual. In 1981 – the year of the first nights – Tashkent critics at the best showed their bewilderment regarding the «strange» performance (maybe absurdism?), at the worst they severely criticized it. A Komsomol executive named it ‘a model of social pessimism’. During the preview even students of the local Drama Institute became outraged (where had sensitive for the new students gone?). They were taught to choose other plays, to play and to perform other ways. Famous Russian writers D.Granin, G.Baklanov, G.Gorin and V.Oskotskiy happened to visit the Days of Soviet Literature in Tashkent and in fact they saved the performance from prohibition.
A year later during the tour to Moscow and Leningrad (1982) «Scenes by a Fountain’ caused the stormiest reaction of theatre-lovers. A little while later the performance became success in Tashkent too. Finally it united with its spectators? Or something (what if not Life?) united the spectators with it?
Semyon Zlotnikov read for me «Scenes by a Fountain» in the spring of 1981 in Tashkent in the house of his parents. He visited it at times. First in the middle 70s he moved to Leningrad and than to Moscow (it was hard to imagine that he would move to Jerusalem). His name started to flash in journalists’ circles and in the theatrical press. «Scenes by a Fountain» became his first «full-length» play (before there were only short one-act plays).
The performance appeared in ILKHOM some months later in November 1981 after Zlotnikov had read the performance for me. This says a lot. First and foremost it says how immediately a producer may fall ill with a play if he finds there «new forms» that Kostya Treplev shouted about. Of course, we need them!
In his elementary plot (the conservative critics wrote «primitive») S.Zlotnikov let eight people go. They struggled in convulsions wishing to love and fight for the good and eternal. Their simple actions turned into the space where everybody desired the good but created the opposite, everybody desired love but they could not love. Everybody uttered words but nobody as usual could hear…
So a character of the play – Electrician – was right thousands times. He rushed after his former wife all the story and he was right to say: «There are no words, no law. So, my dear, it’s impossible to explain. This is what this funny and bitter performance was about: there is no law, the words exhausted and Life deprived people of their abilities to understand and to feel.
Producer’s word. Mark Weil – from the book «Unknown well-known ILKHOM»
Having encircled this serious play with a cleverly developing and funny attraction with chairs that break down under the guests M.Weil does not forget within 1.5 hour to watch how people that a minute ago peacefully talked and drank to the health of the new-married, that looked to be loving each other, turn into evil animals with brute mugs and grimaces. Then there bursts out a scandal sounding like the screech of a spring.
History of a Studio. Theatre, 1981
Natalia Kazmina
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