I went to see “There Is No Tolstoy” at the Moscow theatre “School of Modern Drama”. The production is certainly of interest, in form as much as in content. The form — a “theatre on boards” set down in the middle of the auditorium — breaks the wall between the spectator and the playing area and makes the spectator, if not a participant, then at least a witness of events. Is he drawn into those events? That question belongs no longer to the form but to the content. The “poem without a hero” that Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina’s play offers us is not an easy genre for an audience. Bulgakov’s play “Pushkin” is written in that genre; but the playwright’s command here — unlike Bulgakov’s — leaves an impression of something left unsaid. There is not enough Tolstoy. I caught myself wishing I could talk to Tolstoy, since I had in a way become a member of his household. The hope that such a mental conversation might take place through the figures on stage, Sofia Andreyevna among them, is not fulfilled. The parts of Tolstoy’s children are written rather schematically, though the actors do their best to give them volume. In effect the play is a monologue. Irina Alfyorova gives herself to the action entirely, but her vivid figure stands against rather pale silhouettes. Sofia Andreyevna is a highly complex and tragic figure, caught up in the mighty whirlpool of Tolstoy’s thought and life, and losing in it neither her own face nor her own life. But what that life was, the spectator does not fully understand. Irina Alfyorova does everything she can within the play, just as Sofia Andreyevna did everything she could within the play that Lev Tolstoy wrote anew each day. The limits of length and time do not hold the scale of S.A. Tolstaya’s singular personality. And yet even that touch upon the time and space of the family of one of the geniuses of the Russian land lets us put to ourselves the same questions Tolstoy struggled with — and may be struggling with still.
Thank you to everyone who made this production.
