"The game of blind men" - a play by Mikhail Volokhov , written by him in 1987 in Paris. The play "The game of blind manners" marked the beginning of the Russian tradition of using mat on the stage [1] .
| Blindfold game | |
|---|---|
| Genre | tragicomedy |
| Author | Volokhov Mikhail Igorevich |
| Original language | Russian |
| Date of writing | 1987 |
| Date of first publication | 1993 |
Content
Story
... As for the plot of the play "The Blind Man", its entire plot is a lie. And about the KGB, and about the father, and about the reasons for the murder. But what drives our interest? Why are we in constant tension, although there is practically no plot? Because the plot does not move in a straight line, but in a spiral. They talked about the KGB, then about the CIA, then again the KGB, then killed, did not kill, forced to kill, did not force. There is a movement of despair. The heroes are torn somewhere, this despair is pushing them somewhere.
... That's interesting - they play cards. For what? To the canary! They play cards for the only sacred thing that they still have. After all, they are not playing for money. They don’t need money. Money will be used again for murder or something like that. Do you understand? They play on themselves. This is a very strange thing - an American duel, called the Russian duel in America. Two pieces of paper are put in the hat, whoever pulls the wrong one should shoot himself, instead of dueling. This duel, on the one hand, is masochism and exhibitionism. On the other, revelation.
That is the height of the play, that there is a high degree of self-exposure of the heroes.
... Because the moment has come when the heroes understood something (I don’t presume to explain that), this is not death, it is worse than death, what happens to them. This finding of truth is catharsis when it takes your breath away from the beautiful, what happened to them as a result of all this abomination.
... There is something in this play that I don’t know in any play I know of over the past decades, maybe after Tennessee Williams. This truth goes into some deeper and more painful spheres than the truth of Vampilov, I'm not talking about Petrushevskaya. This play reveals something new in the history of dramaturgy, for example, that it cannot be written other than obscenity. The bottom line is that Volokhov went even deeper into that terrible well, which is without a bottom. We were all afraid that it was without a bottom, but it turned out that the bottom was still there, the bottom is what the author shows.
... And the heroes of Volokhov repent with such self-cruelty that it becomes scary. This is the focus of the play "Blindfold", so you can not tear yourself away from it. Reading it, you involuntarily recognize yourself. You may not be a pederast or a murderer, but you are facing the inevitability of repentance. Repentance is the only thing that remains for us ... With this power of repentance, Volokhov’s play seems to me an outstanding phenomenon.
- Julio Edlis. From a discussion of the play "The Blind Man" at the Literary Institute. Gorky, 1989. [2]
Theater Performances
The "Blindfold Game" was staged almost simultaneously in Moscow and Paris in 1993. In Moscow, the "Blindfold Game" was staged by Andrei Zhitinkin on the stage of the Mossovet Theater with brilliant Lenkom actors, actors Andrei Sokolov and Sergei Chonishvili . The producer of the performance was Independent Theater Project . Later in this performance, "The game of blind men" was played by Oleg Fomin and Dmitry Maryanov [3] .
In Paris [4] [5] [6] and Germany [7] [8] “The Blind Man”, with the assistance of Eugene Ionesco, was directed in French (Cache-cache avec la mort) and German (Blindekuh) by director Bernard Sobel with theater and film stars: Denis Lavan , South Kester, Armin Rokhde, Mikhail Weber in the format of the classical trilogy: A. Chekhov “The Cherry Orchard ” (1903), I. Babel “Maria” (1935), M. Volokhov “The Game of the Blinds” (1989).
Also, "The Blind Man" was staged repeatedly in Germany, Switzerland [9] [10] and France by other directors.
Criticism [11]
Mikhail Volokhov is one of the most original Russian playwrights, whose plays (due to the unusualness of their stories and vocabulary) sometimes cause mixed reviews from critics, but always and unequivocally - a great interest of the audience.
- Grigory Gorin
And the meaning of this Volokhov realism, which has put on an absurdist mask and covered itself with decoys from too quick decryption, is terrible. Man has no gut. All of his roles are imaginary.
- Leo Anninsky
Volokhov’s avant-garde is that, having absorbed the school of the western theater of the absurd, while remaining a deeply Russian classical writer, he doesn’t, unlike other modern writers, diagnose the surrounding evil, but simply builds this evil of ours into the structures of World Fatality, bringing to the absolute, the Stanislavsky testament of the truth of life.
- Andrey Zhitinkin
After watching the play "Blindfolds" staged by the French theater master Bernard Sobel with Denis Lavan and South Kester - there is no doubt one thing - Mikhail Volokhov belongs to a galaxy of writers who write in very condensed metaphorical colors, which never casts a bridle on your imagination in the form of a complex or self-censorship. An author who writes about what others only think, but never formulate.
- Olivier Schmidt, Le Monde