Nelly Uvarova in Minsk

2007-04-18 12:22:57, Katsyaryna Bulanava

The Russian Academic Youth Theatre is going to perform on tour for three days in Minsk.

Now you can hear in the streets, shops and public transport: “Nelly Uvarova! In Minsk! Performance today!” The theatre has brought three performances for us. The first one is “Shadow” by a play of a well-known story-teller Evgenii Schwartz.

Every person has a shadow but not everyone’s shadow leaves to make a great career on its own. But it happens in the performance. A historian Christian Teodor is going to fight with his shadow till the end.

Little is left of the fairy tale in the performance and probably that is why the applause in the Palace of Republic was light and weak. Young actresses got almost all the flowers not for their performance but for the well-known series “Not to be born beautiful”.

The other performance is called “Yin and Yang”. The art director of the Russian Academic Youth Theatre Aleksey Borodin speaks about its author and the way it appeared.

Aleksey Borodin: “This is Boris Akunin’s play. We performed his play “Erast Fandorin” earlier and even brought it to Minsk. The author liked it very much although he confessed he did not really like theatre.

But then he wrote the play “Yin and Yang” especially for us. He made two versions of it – a white and a black one. The plot is the same at the beginning but then it splits into two different ones”.

The third performance is “Rules for Good Manners in the Modern World”. This is a solo performance where only Nelly Uvarova plays. The actress gained popularity after it. The producer of the performance is Alexandr Nazarov, who is also the producer of the well-known series. The actress Nelly Uvarova tells us how she got the role.

Nelly Uvarova: “The producer Alexandr Nazarov let me read the scenario because he wanted to discuss it with somebody. He wanted to see hear some other person’s opinion about it. He wanted an adult actress to play in it. We talked for a very long time because I was really impressed.

The play made me angry: I had to reread passages to get their sense. It was because the author hid it behind many recurrences, aphorisms and digressions. It toughed me, I wanted to get its essence. And I got it!

Nazarov saw my glowing eyes and suddenly asked: “Would you like to play it? I had planned to suggest it to another actress but you have made me change my mind…”

The play of a French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce will be performed in Minsk today. The organizers expect the house to be full in spite of the unusually high price for tickets in Belarus — from 60 to 80 thousand BRB.

Russian critics say the performance “Rules for Good Manners in the Modern World” is not “simply a lecture”. It resembles life – from birth till death.

The theatre’s art director Aleksey Borodin says they are rehearsing a play of a modern English playwright Tom Stoppard – “The Coast of Utopia”. It is a trilogy; there are three performances to be played during a day. The author visited Moscow twice to see the rehearsals and was surprised and impressed. Nelly Uvarova says:

Nelly Uvarova: “He watched it and said at the following rehearsal: “I have added some more there”. I got one more scene, a small one but very good. He said he had been thinking there was something to add and he understood what it was when he watched us rehearsing.

And then, on the eve of his departure, I told him I was worried about the fact that my heroine, a very active woman for that epoch, simply dissolved at the end of the play. No one even said “she came to a bad end”.

I shared my impressions with Tom Stoppard and he said he would add one more scene”.

Such tours are something rare and long-awaited for Minsk inhabitants. You still have a chance to see two performances today.

Комментарии (1,804) на “Nelly Uvarova in Minsk”