The Lensoviet Theatre never released a recording of Yuri Butusov's production. It has to be remembered through footage kind people put up themselves.
Allow me a moment of weakness: no film in recent memory has hit me the way this production did. I assumed the Lensoviet, which has never much bothered with its own archive, would never release a recording of Yuri Nikolaevich Butusov's "The Elder Son" — and that's exactly what happened.
I hope things improve there one day, ideally within my lifetime, both for the people on staff and for the ones who come as guests; at present there's no sign of it even at a distance. So it has to be remembered through footage that kind people put up themselves.
Don't think I'm grieving over it leaving the repertoire. Everything happened as it was supposed to, and that isn't something to change. I'd like it back, of course — not now, though; only as bright memories. Back when Dima Lysenkov was painfully young and playing a forty-year-old father; when Laura, my absolute love, was only starting to take the stage, and you could already feel her manner, and the rawness, and the pain.
They've become successful actors since. I want to believe they'll meet again in new work, or find what they want on their own terms with nobody forcing anything — it all has to come from somewhere real. Better not to lie to yourself, or it turns into a drama eventually, and there's no telling whether it'll resemble Vampilov or come out heavier than that.
Not a recommendation but an attempt to think it through — written straight after the run at the Lensoviet Theatre.
How "Robot Kostya" came about — Russia's first robotic theatre production, where it turned out Chekhovian passions were within a robot's range after all.
Vertinsky in the flesh on the Seventh Tier of the Alexandrinsky — and the question of how defenceless a person is, and how far shut inside their own body.
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