The play produced by Kirill Serebrennikov in the Theatrical Company 814 is destined to become a theatre hit.

This non-commercial and in a way elitist project first of all is attractive due to the fact that it is based on the poem “The Demon” by Lermontov, which is hardly re-read by the majority after leaving high-school. The score of the performance, composed by Alexander Bakshi, resembles Georgian motifs and sounds of commotion of the beyond. Choreographer Gennady Abramov brought his dancers, whose plastic skills allowed them easily transform from the hell spirits into the robbers attacking Tamara’s fiancee, and weepers enveloped in black gowns. Designer Igor Chapurin dressed the spirits in rags, and turned Tamara’s wedding dress into a weightless web, having added it with forged adornment. Leaving for convent, Tamara changes her dress for a torn frock of rough fabric, but even the mortification of the flesh is powerless in front of the seduction of will and passion. Because the fascinating and sarcastic fatal exile – Oleg Menshikov – emerges on the young beauty’s way.
Kirill Serebrennikov, known for his strict, shocking and invariably popular performances, this time produced a parable about love. Unlike Vrubel’s “The Sleeping Demon” * and “The Defeated Demon”, Serebrennikov portrayed the enamored Demon. The coat, carelessly thrown over his shoulders, makes this restless wanderer look like another Lermontov’s hero, who “once came and destroyed for want of anything better to do”. The only difference is that Menshikov’s Demon is not stricken by the virus of Pechorin’s cynicism, evil and opposing spirit. Ages later this spirit will emerge one day on the Patriarshii Ponds in Moscow and become the hero of a different novel. **
In the beginning of the performance, Menshikov is even closer to Woland, than in the end. He is full of bitterness and poison. He looks tired, peaked (the day before a piece of the setting fell on the actor and injured him, and he continued the performance, bleeding). But with every line the weight of the years, glory, disappointments, victories and experience seemed to be wiped off, and Menshikov became what he used to be some time before – the actor with a light Mozartian gift.
“The Demon” emerged in the course of the current search of the scenic equivalents of literary works not intended for theatre. Among the spectators there was Petr Fomenko, the most significant modern director and actually the founding father of this genre, who discovered theatrical nature in “The Queen of Spades”, “War and Peace”, and “Egyptian Nights”. Obvious “relatives” of “The Demon” are the scenic experiments by Valery Fokin and Anatoly Vasiliev.
The text of the poem is intricately divided between the characters, comments flow into monologues, descriptions are wittily embodied into plastic and artistically independent episodes. Though not every director’s boon seems appropriate, but practically all of them are exciting. Because Serebrennikov knew perfectly well, what for he produces the play: to let Oleg Menshikov bring to life the text, which has never been put on the stage (operatic interpretations don’t count). And there’re many women in the world, besides the beautiful Tamara (Natalia Shvets), ready to sacrifice their lives for hearing such a love oath.
Menshikov plays the Demon without pathos and disarmingly sincerely. He jokingly changes stresses and rhythms and breaks the ordinary perception to disclose a new tune in Lermontov’s poem and silently murmur it. Elements of buffoonery come from the arsenal of Hamlet’s tragic irony, when he imitates madness to feel free to say the truth. The new tune, which is chosen for the monologue “On the wastes of airy ocean”, simply hypnotizes the embarrassed beauty. In front of our eyes, Tamara turns into the sinner tormented by the desire. And though this impulsive, courageous and free soul, almost without resistance, comes to meet him, the Demon till the very end doesn’t believe that his only, the first and the last, love can be mutual. He is neither a cynic, nor a collector, and his tear truly burnt the stone down near the cell, where in the midnight silence, the woman, who captured his inhuman heart, listened to his confessions. The Demon’s oath is one of the best scenes of the performance. He has so much faith in what he says that his voice breaks and his eyes fill with absolutely non-theatrical tears. And simply discouraging is the Demon’s answer to the questions of practically surrendered Tamara: “The pains of hell, as we are taught?” – “What of them? I'll be with you there!”
Oleg Menshikov allowed his fallen angel become a human at least for a short while. In the last phrase of the monologue “All you could wish for I shall give, / But love me...”, an almost begging, shy, youthful intonation of Romeo is heard. The actor created the role, which combined the world masterpieces he had never played. He performed the Demon as if it was written for him. And 150 spectators were lucky to see it “under the roof” of the Mossovet Theatre.

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* Author’s mistake. She obviously means Vrubel’s “The Sitting Demon”. (translator’s note)
** The author means Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita”. (translator’s note)