The premiere of The Constant Principle based on a play by Calderon about Prince Fernando, a martyr in the midst of omnipresent war, was performed at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre at the height of terrible events taking place in Sinai, Paris and Lebanon.

At the tail end of the '80s, the end of another beautiful era that had decayed so qualitatively before our eyes, Boris Yukhananov undertook a carefree artistic project called Ha-Ha Funerals — a funeral as performance, a funeral as laughter. In the spasms of juvenile decadence, it seemed that these playful laughing funerals of culture were merely a new beginning, a premonition emerging from the waters of Atlantis. So did many of us think then.

But instead of a beginning, instead of a Silver Age, cadavers arose from the repressed and convulsively resurrected elements of the past. They grew fat in the first decade of the millennium, ghouls of pseudo-cultural pseudo-memory grazing freely on a manure heap, and any hopes of a possibility of rebirth collapsed. In 2013, at the premiere of the first rendition of this play, staged at the School of Dramatic Art, the central image in The Constant Principle corresponded to the centenary of the most prosperous, fulfilling Russian year that was followed by a world war and the collapse of empires.

Two years later, in November 2015, releasing a new version of the piece on the stage of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Yukhananov – a translator of delicate, aerial secrets into the language of life-giving performance — happened upon another anniversary: the centenary of Meyerhold's famous production of The Constant Prince at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Like Meyerhold, who staged a play about a humble, nonresistant, steadfast prince (played incidentally, by an actress) in the midst of a world war, Yukhananov explored the principle of non-aggressive religiosity in the condition of total war of everyone with everything.

Echoing Meyerhold, he sends on stage a “servant of the proscenium” who announces intermissions. There are many breaks: the performance is divided into two huge parts consisting of three acts, each of which occupies approximately nine hours of stage time. You may watch two evenings for four hours, or you may — which is better, in my opinion — take it all in in one day, from lunch until nearly midnight.

Yukhananov read into Calderon's play a whole century of silence, an age of screaming, an age of death that separates us from its first-ever production in Russia. The Silver Age (unread), the shining crown of Russian statehood, trampled anew by the coups of the ’90s, emerges as a hidden theme of this production, simultaneously celebrating its Acmeist and Apollonian, as well as avant-garde and Dionysian features. Moreover: in contrast to Meyerhold, who worked with Konstantin Balmont’s first Russian translation, Yukhananov chose Pasternak's brilliant text (1958), in which the dramatic plot of violence and sacrifice, suffering and punishment was offered up in the language of one who had witnessed the GULAG and Auschwitz. Moving the performance to the Electrotheatre, Yukhananov made it more relentless, dividing it into two halves, one of which is Calderon's playfully and fearlessly performed play, and the other of which offers mutant scenes that, in all their carnival extravagance, lead directly into Pushkin's A Feast in a Time of Plague.

The funeral feast actually begins in Part One, however, when letters spelling P-U-S-H (-K-I-N?) are removed from the stage one by one, like tombstones, in solemn silence, so as to cover the stage with patterned carpets of baroque Calderon. The music of the Arab East, Iranian dances and whirling dervishes interfere with the Christian hymn Kyrie Eleison, prayerful zeal with passion, religious fervor with humility. The patterned daguerreotypes of this intense poetry amaze an ear that was weaned off of it long ago. Alla Kazakova's Phoenix, standing on a balcony over the stage (oh, the memory of a medieval Spanish corral!), shouts out words of unknown longing and, to emphasize her strength, draws first the beauty of flowers wanting to become the sea, and of the sea envying the flowered carpet — but even this beauty leaves her indifferent under the yoke of unknown grief... Her sorrow becomes clearer when the Prince, who secretly yearns for her, answers with a sonnet about fading flowers. Nothing can bring together a Mohammedan and a Portuguese more strongly than the name Phoenix, the image of burning love rising from ashes. In the meantime, her beloved Muley comes out on this bridge over the abyss and, before announcing the mortal danger of the Portuguese fleet moving toward Tangier, is caught in a poetic trance, a vision of the predawn sun, with the participation of young Aurora wiping away tears. The baroque excess of the exalted experience of the beauty of the world in the face of the threat of its destruction suddenly penetrates to the very core of contemporary experience. As such, when the shadows of fighter jets fly over a white field bordered by an ornamental edge, it surprises no one, while the ancient, militant power of words resounds as if from the forgotten depths of life.

The shadows of warriors and poets (baroque twins) hover in the flickering light of mirrors, while we are once again in the crease of civilizations — and the power of faith, with which everyone appeals to Allah or Christ, protects no one in the presence of an unknown longing for love.

Composer Dmitri Kourliandski filled the performance with the sounds of breath and touch — his whispers and rustles shed double light on words that already shimmer with magic. Captives and slaves blow into pipes that wrap their throats like chokers, and extract music that pleases Phoenix.

The poetics of Yukhananov's The Constant Principle are tied into a baroque slip-knot of poetry that gives birth to life from death, and in life recognizes cadavers, the corpses of cooled meanings. Everything here is born in the cemetery, committed "into the hands of death, as it were, on the threshold of life." Calderon’s huge death mask contemplates the four letters PUSH - a sign of violence and root of the name of another poet whose A Feast in a Time of Plague will answer the Spanish prophet, while in the second part Pushkin’s dead face will contemplate the funeral of meanings.

Most of the actors of The Constant Principle underwent verbal and physical training for many years with Anatoly Vasilyev. This training revived out of dust the tradition of poetic mysterial theatre with its sounds piercing the “heavenly” firmament, and created a true army of actors. The secret of the passionate word is revealed in the sad, exalted declamation of Alla Kazakova (Phoenix) and the courageous, “low notes” of Valery Afanasyev (King Fez). But above all it is evident in the duo of Igor Yatsko (Fernando) and Pavel Kravets (Muley). The more the radiant face of Yatsko's Prince’s turns into a beautiful mask of humility and faith, the more frantic Kravets' acting becomes: unlike Grotowski's legendary “Constant Prince,” Yukhananov's Muley resorts to rage, not Fernando, who knows that unrequited love brings more suffering, than the usual kind.

The second part of The Constant Principle depends entirely on the first — it feeds on it. Its blasphemous, carnivalistic parody is reflected in the constant scrolling “martyrs lists” on two monitors of almost all the meaningful names of Russian and European theatre in the twentieth century — from Kantor and Meyerhold to Stanislavsky and Fomenko. The baroque, with its intense contrasts, allows actors simultaneous gestures of grief and joy, blasphemy and pathos. The game of mutant scenes multiplies — we see parodies of Soviet theatre, German theatre, silent theatre, figure skating theatre, fallen angels, werewolves and ghouls, Vertinsky's decadent melodies and sentimental Soviet chansons... Composer Fyodor Sofronov puts on one record after another, and his constant commentary on the musical encyclopedia of the 20th century explodes in the tragic and grotesque rock and roll of A Feast in a Time of Plague. It's not a parody, but rather a farewell to the principle of deconstruction, multiplying ghouls and cadavers, the ritual of living amidst a cemetery.

Pushkin's apocalypse, played out in changing characters and voices, undergoes a truly baroque transformation. The grotesque centaur-Chairman (Andrei Ostrovsky) and the Priest (Svetlana Naidyonova) saturate themselves in images of a culture rotting in the cemetery, frantically and ecstatically creating a cult of death on the threshold of life. And when Kravets, who has just played Muley, revives the Young Man's monologue with it message of “the-one-who-was-first-to-leave-our-circle,” the image of the Constant Prince with his preaching of love and non-violence returns to the circle of the performance.

The cemetery concert ends with a hymn to an entire era, an ode to Yukhananov's generation, the generation of those who relied on rebirth, and found themselves in the midst of a cemetery. The famous song “Orlandina” by Khvostenko-Volokhonsky-Fyodorov is cheerfully sung by actors and spectators alike, bringing to fruition many hours of immersing oneself in the “constant principle.