Eugene
Onegin is familiar enough as an opera or ballet, but this is the
first theatrical production of Pushkin’s verse novel that I have ever
encountered. Rimas Tuminas and his company from the Vakhtangov State
Academic Theatre of Russia give the version an often explicitly
balletic air.
This is by way of solution to the twin problems posed by the task of
bringing Pushkin’s work to the dramatic stage. Firstly, it has little
dialogue as such: a number of hefty speeches as Onegin repeatedly
squanders his chances for a meaningful or satisfying life, but few
conventional verbal exchanges. Yet it is simply impossible to escape
the words: their rhyme, their metre, everything taking place in those
14-line Pushkinian stanzas of springy tetrameter. How to foreground and
sidestep the words simultaneously? Tuminas introduces narrators, older
versions of Onegin (played on the press night by Sergei Makovetskiy,
although actors alternate in most roles) and his friend Lensky (Oleg
Makarov in a role which is a bit of a liberty, as Lensky dies in a duel
before he gets that old). These figures take the lion’s share of the
exposition and the authorial musings on life, love and the Russian
spirit. During such sequences, the stage is often arranged in simple
tableaux. Action comes elsewhere, in a number of almost or entirely
wordless set-piece scenes in which the visuals do the talking.
Some of these scenes are surreal, such as the dream of Onegin’s young
neighbour Tatyana (a luminous Eugeniya Kregzhde) when infatuated with
him, or a bizarre bunny-hunt (an episode which comes from Pushkin’s
life rather than the poem). Some are stylised near-naturalism, like
that duel provoked by Onegin’s foolish arrogance, in which he kills his
best friend. Some are gleefully satirical, such as an ineffably dreary
name-day party for Tatyana, which parodies St Petersburg society balls
by presenting their rural opposite (and is perhaps
too gleeful; we’ve really got the
point after the first four or five grotesquely incompetent turns by the
party guests). What Tuminas’ production has in common with Pushkin’s
original is that after a while one moves beyond even such exuberantly
ostentatious form and simply appreciates the content.
Written for the Financial
Times.