I can be misunderstood. But I will say it anyway. I think it is the right time for the art – literature, theatre, and cinema – to stop paying attention to the life we live today. And return to the life a human has always lived. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsyn, Khasbulatov, Baburin, Starovoitova – too much time has been spent on them. Let’s live for our own selves. Hell with the millennium that is outside. Let’s close the window. Let’s remember how we lived when we considered all those people, whose photos were in all the newspapers, a bunch of fools, and thought ourselves geniuses – we were quite good at it! We need to escape to our kitchens again; make some coffee, girl, pour some dry wine, buddy, well, what is left, turn on the music half volume and don’t forget to turn the dialer and stick a pencil into it – so, what’s new, old pal?.. And here we go.
We must admit that nothing comes out of the new life, and it means we must cool down and live out the old one…
And having looked at the stage with a clear eternal human eye, free of everything momentary, we will see the performance “N”, a duet play about two people: one is bright and suffering from an elevated disease; and the other is healthy and gloomy, but gradually getting ill. Actually, it is this course of disease that makes the plot of the play. An in the end we see that the first doesn’t get well, but the second gets ill, though he still remains gloomy. And only the finale gives the hope of absolute deliverance. But let’s have the finale to end with.
"N" stands for "Nizhinsky". The actors are Oleg Menshikov and Alexander Feklistov. They play at the level of virtuoso musicians. I would say jazz-musicians. Meaning the skill of the two soloists to play together. One, another, one, another, and now together – voila! – both roller-skate; one, another, one, another, and suddenly – up! – both jumped nearly at the top of the thick marble pillars and, having embraced them, happily slipped down them to the floor. This is the performance! Yes, the plot, yes, the theme, yes, the idea, yes, the task, yes, the superior task, but the performance! And beauty. Without it the contemporary theatre is not theatre at all. The beauty of the whole and the beauty of the part. The relief of a white felt coat, designed by Pavel Kaplevich, makes not a costume, but the text of the performance. And the hall, where “N” is performed, is the assembly hall of an old Moscow gymnasium in the Prechistenka Street. With a small stage, crowned with a classical triangle pediment. And the finale…
In the finale the unbelievable happens. I have never seen anything of the kind. Such moments are remembered to the end of one’s life. Both what’d happened, and the feeling – emotional, artistic and physiological at the same time.
The performance was declining. The two actors were standing at the side of the stage against the wall of the hall. The one who acted as Nizhinsky asked the one who didn’t act as Nizhinsky: “Have your ever seen the Vision of Rose?”
"Yes... no... Can’t remember..." - "And I’ve seen it. Look". – And parted from the wall. And ran to the opposite wall. There a window opened, and the actor, having passed the jumping board, pushed off it, and after flying a couple of meters absolutely horizontally, flew out of the window. Ah!.. The window closed immediately. What was it? I was sitting in the first row; I saw a man flying by me with enlightened face and stretched hands. An angel passed by. And disappeared in the open window. Such trick would’ve won admiration even in circus, but in theatre…
Once Alexei Petrenko said in a night talk in his kitchen: “The theatre will improve only when there will be circus”. At first I didn’t get it. But later I did. It means that if in theatre a partner’s or theatrical’s mistake might cause a lethal end, everybody will work properly. But after the finale of “N” I thought about the deeper sense of Petrenko’s words. The artistic one. If the performance ends with such a powerful, risky and real finale, it means everything that had happened before was real too. I believed. And so did the person performed by Feklistov. Seeing the hero’s parting leap, we believed.
And I wished childly that at some moment when you have run short of arguments and nobody listens to you anymore to be able to prove your case in the same way. Or just run up and fly away from all that, from everything…
A man can’t do that.
Theater can.

Submitted by Irina Kuznetsova.