N is someone who the author prefers not to name, who can be imagined but you never can be quite sure that this image is correct. In the Russian text the magical cryptography of the sign is felt stronger: strange inscription of the familiar sound, a guest from different system. However sometimes some real name happens to begin with this letter…
In the performance by Menshikov, Feklistov, Kaplevich, - the production which is unusual in many senses: the play reminds rather of a screenplay, and in the playbill there are the playwright, the art-director, the actors, but no director - the universal, almost losing its outline N releases both the audience and the participants of direct interpretations. Two actors on stage create a world where N Nizhinsky is none of them and both of them, and N - Someone has so many faces that almost doesn't have a face.
In spite of the expectations (anxiety) there's only one direct choreographic quotation in the performance:

- Have you ever seen the Vision of Rose? - Menshikov's hero will ask his permanent interlocutor.
- No.
- And I have!

And, as it was described for dozens of times in the ballet history, in two leaps he will fly over the hall and jump out of the window. The most ordinary, "non-theatrical" window, looking from the second floor of the ex-Polivanovskaya grammar school mansion into a dark desolate yard, breathing into the hall with damp and cold Moscow air. But it's through this hyper realistic in relation to its ballet prototype and nearly circus feat performed by a ballet artist, there comes another N into the action - some almost unknown in modern theatre quality,

"Instead of cock-and-bull story,
Not the reciting we expect,
But actor's genius in death".

Probably, for the sake of a unique chance to explore it, the creators of the performance refused the guiding vectors of director's schemes, and started a risky journey of amateurs. However, here they were partly insured by Pavel Kaplevich's rare ability - who is always, in any of his works, is a bit more than an art-director - to put up constructions that hold the action. But the whole visual line, with its "gloomy woods" of pseudo-marble pillars, with reviviscent tweedledum and tweedledee dolls, precisely adjusted lights and white-and-grey costumes, doesn't turn into a still scheme even for a moment, but brings to life the space breathing freely in tact with the rhythm of the performance. The performance, where the authors didn't aim at reproducing plot lines, but tried to find inner logic of a fate, that dizzied friends, and foes, and descendants, fitted into the mysterious N and rhymed in Nizhinsky-Zhizn*…
Nizhinsky-Zhizn, Bog-Podvokh, Myaso-Myasin** - these rhymes appearing in elegantly composed dialogs are more precise and distinct than poetic parts of the paly. But at some moment you catch yourself at thinking it's not that important, because the energy born by the performance and guiding it, appears not in the text and the zone of abstract speculative constructions, but bypassing the temptation of sensuality hidden in the material, develops into the only and universal feeling which is the authors' love for their character and the gifted opportunity to come where they can see the Vision of Rose.
Amazing internal space of the two actors, for whom it's not necessary to act a scene, but is enough to imagine it, endlessly widens the borders of the action allowing to include in it everything that remained as if out of brackets: the ballet line itself, the cobwebs of life conflicts, and the historical context…
"N" will hardly open a new direction in modern theatre developing. It will rather remain if not the only one but the unique attempt of the kind. Almost a Podvokh, behind which, if follow the rhyme of the performance, there is…

***

* - 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.
** - again the play of Russian consonant words: Bog (God) rhymes with Podvokh (Trick), Myaso (Meat) rhymes with Myasin (the family name, derived from this word).