There are its advantages in the production about Nizhinsky - the art-director and two actors. The disadvantages are the dramaturgy and direction. In total there is a utopian project of "BOGIS" Agency with the name which as if cancels itself - "N".
The combination of sounds, hidden behind this letter confuses and alarms, but you feel like repeating it and rhyming to spite death: "Nizhinsky - zhizn"*.
Just like any other modern work based on "life and creation", the performance "N" attracts with supposed complicity to genius's mystery, but repels with approximateness of knowledge. Nizhinsky's life, the energy of his fate, the air of the myth about him tempts like a phantom of beauty. His appearance was promised to take place in an ancient mansion in Pretchistenka street, in the hall of children's music school named after Vano Muradely. The walls of the ball-room are painted with oil-paint, the chandelier shines with electric bulbs, but the portico above the stage and the pillars on it seem real.
The action begins in the side window of the hall. Someone gets in through it at first producing an impression of a real man from outside who found free entrance to the expensive show. Stealthily, hiding his head in his shoulders, having closed the shutters behind himself, he hides in dark. But after the first monologue Mr. N has a no less mysterious incognito interlocutor, waiting for him in the darkness of the stage.
Despite some excitement, the production appears to be a modest show. Its beauty hasn't become pompous and annoyingly tasteless. Due to tactfulness of its art-director, Pavel Kaplevich, the looks of the performance are not mutilated with pretentious stylishness. The costumes are made perfectly, in accordance with the models of the beginning of the century, their outlines are almost in museum style, needless to say about the shoes which precisely copy the originals. A standard French curtain, a basket with rose petals, copies of Petrushka's hat from Fokin-Benoit's ballet and the costumes of Faun and The Chosen One from "The Rite of Spring" actually form all the properties. Here the taste is obeyed and respect to other's material culture is shown. Only deliberately effective attraction with pillars, which turn out to be inflatable, in some way compromises the artist. In the moment of mental breakdown the hero crashes them, throwing about, pushing aside, and that must obviously mean the break of old, monumental, classic ballet if Emperor's stage.
Five characters - two "heroes" (Nizhinsky's "Ego" and "super-Ego"), a boy and a girl (phantom recollections in the same costumes), and a doll (a precise copy of one of the heroes) in fact perform a monodrama. In other words, "a kind of dramatic performance that, trying to communicate to the spectator the emotional estate of a hero as fully as possible, creates on stage the environment as perceived by the character at any moment of his stage life". (N.N. Evreinov).
The playwright brings the characters together at the point of madness, thus hoping to expose the conflict, to intensify the situation, recreate the flow of subconsciousness, but in fact - delirium. But the paly which is a concentrated cocktail of the book by V. Krasovskaya "Nizhinsky", Nizhinsky's diaries and the poems by the playwright Aleksey Burykin is obviously secondary. Plenty of poems, ordinary in idea and form, provoke the actors to recite them in the manner of performance at a reading contest, undermines the trust to the creators of the production, or at least bewilders.
As theatre talks affirm, the rehearsals of "N" engaged three directors. The first, Ivan Popovsky, was invited by the agency in the beginning of the work. The cold beauty of plastics, the adjusted rhythm of his "Adventure" didn't echo in this performance. To change the disciple, a master was invited. Petr Fomenko who presented Oleg Menshikov with the glorious part in the production "Caligula" is not mentioned in the playbill. And neither is Edwrad Radzyukevitch, the graduate of Shukin Higher School (he was the third).
At the absence of distinct dramaturgy and direction the performance is held only by the actors, their personal energy.
Feklistov and Menshikov, in a sketch manner which leaves space for improvisation, play the fate of decayed consciousness overcoming the limits of possible in creation.
Menshikov, with his appearance, with his light playful plastics brings to life the image of Nizhinsky, a man of early 20th century, the Nizhinsky of "Games".
Thus, on the common photos the real dancer looks unprotected "Blue God" near the every-day naturalness of the surrounding. In the duet Menshikov plays the tormented, he seems to be constantly ready to dart off, run away, jump out of reality.
Feklistov is full of power and strength. His part is the part of a trained, strong, enduring body who let the wild soul to stay on earth for long sixty years, despite the chaotic leaps and tricks of the mind. Feklistov plays the tormentor, with a few strokes hinting at a near resemblance with Diaghilev. Diaghilev, who "made" Nizhinsky like Pygmalion his Galatea, Diaghilev-the-master, from whose sweet yoke Nizhinsky broke free at the high price - the price of creative self-immolation.
However such scheme of the characters' relations is not quite distinctly determined, it's just a supposition.
Among the admirers of the performance there are many Oleg Menshikov's worshipers. Menshikov, who found a mask of contemporary superman-neurasthenic-hero in A. Khvan's film "Dyuba-Dyuba", brought a light, attractive, fairly eccentric, a bit theatrical elegance in the production. His grace bordering on mincing manners, his grotesque flowing into lacy performance, strengthen the impression of ambivalence. The actor promises a lot, but only at one moment, the moment of theatre triumph, keeps the promise. This is the moment of the ending, when the hero commits a leap out of the wide-open window. This brilliantly performed pass-copy (obviously with the help of the consultant, Andris Liepa) is the reconstruction of Nizhinsky's leap in the ballet "The Vision of Rose" by Fokin: this is the leap of liberation, dash into insanity, to eternity. And this is the last chance to escape.
The window is shut. Everything sinks into darkness.

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* - in Russian "zhizn" means "life" and this word is consonant to Nizhinsky, thus the author uses the pun which has sense only in Russian. That's why direct translating can't deliver this idea.