Why Has the Curtain from the Moscow Art Theatre Been Hung in the Okolo Theatre?

Yury Pogrebnichko, together with the actors Alexey Chernyshev and Maxim Solopov, has staged Hamlet. Regulars of the Okolo Dома Stanislavskogo theatre will remember the Hamlet interludes, scenes and stray lines in The Cherry Orchard and, indeed, in many other things in the theatre's repertoire. Now Hamlet himself has come to grace this stage.

The result is yet another extraordinary, delicate and thoughtful production. And one of Moscow's best-loved theatres, it seems, has become still more Stanislavskified, if that is possible.

In essence, Pogrebnichko presents at once Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Hamlet of Gordon Craig staged at the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhT) with Stanislavsky and Sulerzhitsky in 1911, and a great stratum of criticism and reflection on that production, which has since passed into history. Alongside the Shakespearean lines, among other things, Doroshevich's feuilleton on Craig's venture springs back to life.

Hence, alongside Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Gertrude, Fortinbras, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavsky, Craig, Kachalov and Vishnevsky, a participant in the production is also Shekhtel's curtain of the old MKhT, with the seagull embroidered upon it. The same faces, moreover, turn out to be Stanislavsky and Polonius, Hamlet and Kachalov, Vishnevsky and the King. Craig, in ever-changing footwear (respect to the costume designer Nadezhda Bakhalova for this and indeed for all the images), is played by one of the actors who stood at the source of the Okolo theatre, Yury Pavlov.

The plot, as almost always at Okolo, travels through time, slipping like an urban romance from our own days into the early twentieth century, and from there into Shakespeare's original text, presented in fragments that are not the most hackneyed but are emblematic both for the source and for our own reality. In the end, as everyone remembers, “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

Thanks to the organisers of the showing, a bow to the company, and a firm handshake to Yury Nikolayevich Pogrebnichko