Last night I finally had the opportunity to enjoy Yuri Butusov's production of King Lear at the Satirikon theater.
After having seen this dynamic combination of director (Butusov) and actor (Raikin) produce nothing short of a visionary version of Richard III at the same theater, I was understandably excited for last night's show and a reunion of the same creative team, anxiously waiting to see if lightning could strike twice. Adding to my anticipation was the fact that I had just seen Butusov's Ivanov at the Moscow Art earlier this month, and that this was the first time I had ever seen a production of Lear. In short, I was reasonably pumped.
Lear is no simple play, neither for the directors, the actors, nor the audience. Even writing an analysis or review of the production seems to be a task daunting in size. As we were riding home on the metro immediately after the show, I found myself nearly overwhelmed with the seemingly simple task of summarizing the plot with my friend, not wanting to skip over or leave out any plot point which might be important later on, and at the same time trying to keep things as clear as possible. I suspect this blog entry will resemble more of the same; trying to streamline the impressions from this particular interpretation while also trying to convey a piece of the profound significance of Lear's message.
In search of a starting point for this entry, I visited the Satirikon website, where among some great photos of the show, I found this note. It certainly puts a lot of this extremely intense piece of theater into perspective...
"Не упрощая шекспировских смыслов и предлагая зрителю довольно сложную метафорическую структуру, Юрий Бутусов рассказывает историю, в которой распад семьи, распад страны, распад личности – все связано друг с другом. Король Лир вообразил себя равным Богу – вот и раздал королевство дочерям, чтобы просто посмотреть, что из этого получится."
And here's my patented on-the-fly translation...
"Without simplifying Shakespeare's meaning and proposing a relatively difficult metaphorical structure to the audience, Yuri Butusov tells us a story in which the collapse of a family, the collapse of a country, and the collapse of an individual are all connected to each other. King Lear imagined himself to be God's equal - and so he divided his kingdom between his daughters, just to see what would happen."
The first thing that caught my attention after watching the show, and what this paragraph essentially confirmed for me was the complexity of Butusov's visual metaphorical language. Butusov has always been a champion of the etude and metaphor; his production of Richard is full of imagery as well, but there the metaphors are much clearer. Here they are shrouded in mystery are association. Noticeable is how the use of the color red grows throughout the show, starting out as merely an accent, and eventually covering the entire stage as the bloodiness and horror of the story mount. Each of Lear's three daughters has her own color as well, with Lear sharing white with Cordelia. By the end of the show, white is almost completely supplanted by red. Butusov's use of acrobatics is also in full force in this piece, with characters like Edgar and Lear himself (Raikin's physical and acrobatic ability never cease to amaze me) pulling flips and fast-paced rolls, either during Edgar's transformation into Tom o'Bedlam, or during Lear's rant against the storm. They suggest something of a mental transformation is occuring alongside throbbing background music that borders on techno; Edgar pronounces his intention of going into hiding, covers himself in slime and practically breakdances in the muck to a deafening, throbbing synthesized beat. It produces an effect that is both grotesque and urgent. In short, the visual language is complicated and intense. 
As far as plot goes, it is interesting to note that this interpretation does not combine the roles of Cordelia and the Fool; and the effect is fascinating...and harrowing all at the same time. In a play that is so overwhelmingly dark (Gloucester has his eyes put out onstage), we as audience members are constantly looking to find some form of sympathetic character. We cannot fully sympathize with Lear, as much of the trouble has been caused by his own foolishness, and Gloucester has to lose his sight before he realizes his errors. If the roles of Cordelia and the fool are combined, then the obvious saviour and voice of reason in the play immediately becomes her. In this show, however, there are no easy answers. Cordelia is absent during her father's insane journey through storm, and in this version Lear even kills the fool in a fit of raving madness. We are left with Kent, loyal from the beginning to Lear, but he is presented to us in such a feeble and helpless state (indeed, he is always either in the stocks, getting beaten, or is completely stripped of all his clothes, naked and defenseless against the world) that it is impossible to picture him as any kind of a heroic character. The result is a world where madness and evil reign supreme, and those qualities such as justice and good which we would search for to come to the rescue arrive too late to repair the damage. 
The moral of this Lear becomes bleak and disturbing. "Nothing comes from nothing" is taken one step further in this show to "evil comes from evil", as all the characters realize their mistakes too late to save themselves from the cruelty of reality, the harshness of the storm. Butusov saves his most powerful image in the show for last, as Lear, who has survived all three of his daughters, helplessly and feebly tries to prop each of them up againt three pianos like life-size dolls, trying to return to them some illusion of life. As the stage is slowly engulfed in darkness, he moves from corpse to corpse as the bodies fall repeatedly onto the keys behind them, giving a discordant voice to Lear's inner agony and grief; all is lost.
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