POWER VS. PEOPLE Crimean Tatar actors know about the confrontation from their own experience
When classical tragedies, like Shakespeare's Macbeth, appear in repertories it means that society is living through something worse than a crisis, that there is a "crack in the world" and in human souls. Also, this means an attempt to assess the situation on both the sociological and spiritual planes. Grigori Kozintsev's King Lear was an expose of the inner disembowelment of the Soviet regime, its being spiritually doomed. Lviv's Zankovetska Company recently staged Macbeth (sickly marshy green weeds entangling the Tyrant, cynical vulgar Witches straddling him) — a moral summary of the perestroika period.
Macbeth is on the stage of the Crimean Tatar Theater today. Why this company? Why now?
To answer, one ought to compare this production with the King Lear at Kyiv's Ivan Franko Ukrainian Drama Company. The two renditions have something in common. Both seem to caution against the same threat. King Lear represents power devoid of good and truth. Kyiv's production is an icy, balanced-crazy experiment. Bohdan Stupka as Lear is not old He is vigorous, physically strong, but much more insane than the Fool, a small town buffoon, witty, and a born minstrel. The king is insane from the start, brandishing a bludgeon and noose which he jokingly slips round the necks of those present, speaking in a shrill voice. After dividing and giving away his kingdom, and being treated so unjustly, he gives vent to emotions strikingly resembling Gorbachev's after the Foros captivity (How dare they! I am power eternally reincarnated, even though denied my throne...), addressing the apocalyptic (Chornobyl?) skies, with howling winds and emptiness all around.
In the Crimean production, empty space also dominates the set (production designer Yuri Surakevich). Dark entrances and exits with hellish fire glimmering inside. A crude heavy battering ram hanging from chains in the center of the stage. Characters fight, die, and tell fortunes on it. And the king kicks them all off the battering ram in the end, standing motionless, with a "vacant" crown held up high. The ram is not simply part of the setting, it is a symbol of Fate.
At this point one should remember that democracy as a much advertised method of administration based on collective agreement, inherited by Europe from Ancient Greece and Rome, showed its dark side even at that distant time — the concept of Fate, omnipotent, standing over and above all moral dictates. In Macbeth, the three Witches originate from the pagan goddesses of destiny. Fate recognizes no rights, one cannot come to terms with her, even by acting on the people's behalf. Man's freedom, inner as well as external, was brought not by political coups, but by new religions spreading over the world, denying the omnipotence of the blind elements embodied by Fate.
Now this is the key to understanding the Crimean Macbeth. And the tragedy of power in the twentieth century. A century fraught with the danger of returning to the abyss of pre-civilization — or rather, the witch-infested, archaic pagan past, when sorcery and Fate were uppermost, where, as the Witches sing in Macbeth, evil is good and good is evil, where the most virtuous of men may become a first-rate scoundrel.
This is why all the principal characters are young and physically attractive, on the verge of grotesque, including Macbeth (Mustafa Kurtmullajev), Lady Macbeth (Alije Temirkajaeva), the clever "lone wolf" Macduff (Akhtem Seitablajev), even the Witches. Such is the plot worked out by stage director Vladimir Anosov. Frenzied plastique, brimming energy spilling into emptiness. A world in which there is no supremacy of good and truth making up the notion of God. No solid foundations that are folk ethics and memories. Only the Ubermenchen, egotists drunk with self-awareness as the chosen few.
Lady Macbeth, entwining her lithe intoxicating body round Macbeth's, implores him:
"When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man..."
She wants him to remove all obstacles in his way to even greater power. Kill one, then two, then hundreds of those who stand in your way... Like it was done to the Crimean Tatars and, in a way, to all of Ukraine. To do all this, one has to kill one's conscience first, yield to the charms of power, however corrupt and aimless, but tangible and seemingly omnipotent.
And the people? They are on stage and in the audience. All of us. We hear a fable. A lady sold her love and her future children for the magic of power. And died. There was a leader, loved by one and all. He yielded to the same magic, destroying himself and his country, and died. He died of spiritual solitude even before his physical existence ended. But we the people survived. The people and their memories are eternal. They leave no room for chaos and Fate, meaning dirty politicking. Where there is history there is always sense.
Such is the good moral of the bad, heartless Macbeth at the Crimean Tatar Theater, currently nominated for the Taras Shevchenko Prize.
Photo:
Alije Temirkajaeva as Lady Macbeth
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№1, (1998)Section
Culture