Yesterday the Satire Theatre held an open pre-premiere rehearsal of “Pygmalion”, staged by the director Viktor Kramer after Bernard Shaw’s play of 1912. The title of this note does not mean that the director showed us a clash of opinions, a movement towards truth, and that truth itself. What we saw was rather the director’s inner monologue, his conversation with himself in the presence of an audience. Kramer talked to Kramer much as Henry Higgins in the play talked to Colonel Pickering. The language of the two Kramers’ conversation was largely symbolic. The loud music of the sound effects, and the shouting of Eliza Doolittle and of most of the other characters, drowned the sense of what they were saying. In effect the sound itself became the principal acting — more precisely, the principal acting-upon — presence of the evening. The struggle against bourgeois culture, for the sake of which Shaw wrote the play, gave way to a symbolic confrontation between three generations of characters. Symbolic precisely, because the human qualities of the representatives of all three ages leave equally much to be desired. The situations the characters find themselves in are transformed, the language of their exchanges changes, but the substance of their natures stays as it was. The dynamism of situation on stage is only a form in which the stasis of character expresses itself. The open ending has an ambiguous effect. On the one hand it allows the spectator to imagine how the plot might go on; on the other it deprives the composition of completed meaning. Put simply, the starting point — “Kramer” — does not differ greatly from the end point, “Kramer”.
The direct address to the auditorium by the gifted and experienced actress Alyona Yakovleva partly compensates for the hermetic quality of the staging and awakens in the spectator a wish to continue the performance and enter into dialogue with those who made it.
The introversion of the production does not, however, deprive it of theatricality. The sound design, the scenography, the original blocking, the sets and the costumes all show the director’s creative gift and leave the production in the memory as a bright event — not only in the life of each spectator, but in the theatrical life of Moscow.
