It's interesting to guess what Oleg Menshikov feels after the end of "Caligula", where he plays the leading role. Is it devastation; longing for loneliness or, on the contrary, the throng, conversations, a glass of wine, vodka? One can assume the first, the second and the third, - it's hard to imagine that he calmly goes home detached from everything he has just made us go through and - has gone through himself.

But why "gone through himself"? Is it because we want him to experience everything, isn't it? Do we need more than his skill, perfect work on the role; do we agree to see only the real death? No matter how cannibalistic it may sound, it seems to be so. But there is one thing here: Oleg Menshikov is to blame for our wish - he and the director Peter Fomenko who'd supported the frenzy the role was played with. "The performance was played with" - it is also can be said about "Caligula" and it will be the truth; but there is a line other actors don't cross, and Menshikov has crossed it. One can agree with those sober voices that admit that the actor doesn't feel closeness to his character every evening when the performance is on. However, when the role appeared he felt it. During hours of rehearsals. And during all the hours when the character and his creator were walking together united.
Besides Menshikov himself, I'll find one more approval. A very talented actress and undoubted master said once that on tour she had to come onstage almost every evening and play the leading role, and one night she decided to act on pure technique and got tired like never before. It's easier to live than to pretend - that's how her words may be interpreted. This actress was Marina Neelova.
Albert Camus wrote "Caligula" when he was young. Back then the world didn't know everything about itself: the truth about Auschwitz was yet to come, our Gulag was far away. And one could talk abstractedly about the nature and the scope of tyranny. The evil enticed, but one could see it vaguely, from far away. Our contemporaries cannot do it the same way. Surmises and presentiments became the knowledge, and this knowledge became painful, if not fatal. To understand and forgive would have been immoral; not to want to understand would have meant to voluntarily doom oneself to failure. Besides Camus's text didn't allow to decline the knowledge of what was going on. The actor accepted the conditions he had stated - actually, that's what he based his role on, without polemizing but still switching it to another register.
Which one? If you want to hear a determiner, it can be "frenzy". That's what captivates the audience and makes it impossible to take eyes away from a slim, barefooted figure wearing some black simple clothes. From the pale face, febrile eyes and a violently inquiring voice. You strain your ears not even to hear the flow of arguments, which refute or confirm one another, - one can get lost in them; you surrender yourself to the power of intonations, changing unpredictably, and scenes, concealing danger and following one another in the blink of an eye.
If you take this Caligula as a thoroughly masked and prepared move, you won't see any guile in him. He kills his victims not condescending to craftiness and feeling neither joy nor even satisfaction. However, it would be wrong to think he kills them in cold blood. This game is fatal for Caligula himself. And he knows it. That's why we see growing fever and frenzy that makes him dart off every now and then, circle about the stage rushing to people surrounding him. He comes up instantly and unexpectedly, embraces, looks straight in the eyes and - as he can find nothing but horror in them - pushes aside.
Again, don't think that after he sees courage or repentance in them (the plot against him has been hatched out by now, and Caligula feels it), he will change his mind. Menshikov plays from the contrary. People he despises are more necessary to him than those who try to breast the current. The former confirm his right to manipulate, and the latter deprive him of this right.
Menshikov could have portrayed the fight or at least an attempt of the fight between evil and good passions in the character's soul, if he had taken a skin-deep look at the role or, rather, the life that corrects it. However, this possibility is tempting to neither him nor the director. Everything is in darkness, and everything stays in the darkness that thickens more and more. Caligula walks along the destined road, which leads to self-destruction.
There is a daring, but convincing, piercing and significant episode in the final part of the performance. Nevertheless, can the washing of the head be piercing? They bring a washbasin, a jug; they pour water, just as it should be. But somehow, you feel that this water doesn't wash the head, it cools it. All the events - murders, betrayals, fear - have tensed the atmosphere and it seems to explode in a second. And the pouring water is a respite, a moment of salvation.
Something else - also piercing and offensive - can be seen in this episode. And that is an absolute and obvious contempt the master feels for his servants. "I can do whatever I want to, and I will be able to do a lot by the time you decide to kill me". Isn't it so?
The performance "Caligula" is on the stage "Under the roof". There is such a place in the Mossovet Theatre, although there is no real stage there. Spectators and actors are close to each other: if you reach out your hand, you can touch an actor's clothes, and of course, you can see their faces, untouched by make-up, very clearly. The performance lasts two hours and twenty minutes and has no interval. Menshikov is always onstage. Even when he disappears for a minute or two, one can still feel his presence. And it horrifies those who exist onstage next to him and gives a strange feeling to spectators who get involved in the nightmare of the events against their will. It is hard to get rid of this feeling; those who were there will remember it forever.
There is only one thing left to mention. The first performance was shown in the end of May in 1990. "Caligula" was rarely on and soon it was withdrawn from stage at all. Oleg Menshikov was invited to play Esenin in England. After a long pause, the performance was staged again. In February, it was announced as a premiere.