The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre has unveiled the premiere of The Constant Principle, directed by the theatre's artistic director Boris Yukhananov, and based on works by Calderon and Pushkin.
Roman Dolzhansky reports.

You can watch the The Constant Principle two ways — either over two weekday evenings, or, if you prefer a single sitting, you will have to devote an entire day off to the theatre. Ultimately, however, there will be six sittings: the play consists of two parts, each consisting of three acts. The total time with intermissions is nearly ten hours. Yet I would not advise future viewers of The Constant Principle to fear the one-day marathon: I suspect the creators intended on evoking the sensation of a piece of eternity. They offer a chain of states, whereby, half an hour after the start, viewers asks themselves in horror: How will we sit this out to the end? But when they are released to go home around midnight, they regret that an amazing journey through genres and times has ended.

The first version of The Constant Principle was staged by Boris Yukhananov two years ago at the School of Dramatic Art. Those who saw that version may, if they wish, conduct a comparative analysis. But at the Electrotheatre Yukhananov's epic acquires new meaning, clearly rounding out a trilogy of large projects: His fantasy on the themes of The Blue Bird, the director's first production at his newly rebuilt Stanislavsky Theatre, was a journey into the past of Soviet theatre; his Drillalians opera cycle, with music by contemporary composers, was a futuristic project; and now The Constant Principle, which addresses issues of the present. Moreover: in the ensuing two years Calderon's play, The Constant Prince, has only grown stronger in its urgency — its hero, a Portuguese prince, accepts martyrdom for the sake of faith. He sacrifices himself so that a city that has become a stronghold of Catholicism on the edge of the African continent will not be handed over to Muslims.

In Part One, Boris Yukhananov seems to sift Calderon's text through the most varied methods of sophisticated theatricality. Subtitles in Russian and English will help those who fear becoming entangled in the shifts of rhythms and styles, registers and focuses of attention. The set design by Yuri Kharikov, the video art by Stepan Lukyanov, and the music by Dmitri Kourliandski — beautifully called sonography — give you every right to contemplate this work superficially, to probe it deeply, or to merely turn off your hearing and/or sight. The plot moves forward as the charismatic Igor Yatsko's prince heroically defends his principle, but at the same time the words that the spectator sees seem to be seated on different acting schools and different types of theatre, their invisible force fields continually making themselves known. It is no coincidence that early in the second act monitors show an endless “list of martyrs,” rather like credits after a film — these are the great names of departed figures of Russian and world theatre. Yukhananov, as it were, invites them to be his silent collaborators on a mysteriously beautiful journey.

The production has a subtitle — "Two cemeteries and one concert in three acts." The second part consists of the cemetery and concert. In Yukhananov's world, nothing, not a single idea, is ever equivalent to itself, thus in Part Two he arranges a terrible, but humorous test of the principle from Part One — constancy here turns into “patterns and mirages,” in which, at first glance, there is nothing to understand: bikers give way to the Bolshoi Theater, Vertinsky's songs transform into the funeral of a suicide, then into a full-fledged disco that seems to reveal the whole of Soviet history. In the mocking, sometimes simply satirical, but consistently precise timing and gestures, Yukhananov's historical cabaret has room for revolutionary marches, sacred chants, and lowbrow songs. The director is not afraid of being distracted, of getting carried away by any given number — he invariably finds pleasure in the metamorphoses of his stylistic "forays," and the audience experiences his joy.

Naturally, not only the impeccable technical performance of such a complex composition can unite the performance into a single whole. There is a single idea hanging over this entire curious collage — the idea of ​​death. This — death’s inevitability — is the constant principle that the director so boldly pursues. Thus does the final part offer up Pushkin’s A Feast in a Time of Plague, although not as an abstract philosophical reflection, but rather as a mocking concert in a cemetery. The notion of ​​the challenge that death throws at us, and of our accepting it, worthily crowns this six-part performance. Everything dies in the world, everything dies in theatre, too - texts, ideas, and dreams. In the end, one must also die in order to win and prove fidelity to one's principles. "When this is all over, it's time to go home," an actress groans, frozen, like a monument, in an uncomfortable position of copulation with a partner. Her shout interrupts the text of the priest from A Feast in the Time of Plague, which she had uttered before. It seems melancholic humor is indeed capable of brightening even the darkest conclusion.