Alexander Gnezdilov:
"Two days until the online premiere of "The Remains of the Day."
The live performance lasted 4:15 with two intermissions—and not every bird flew to the middle of our Dnieper. The video version lasted almost 3:40. A saga.
Why not faster, more concise, discarding details and nuances?—you now ask yourself.
And you answer yourself: because it's a novel. And I wanted to preserve this genre in the production. To preserve the novelistic form, the special scale of the narrative, while simultaneously maintaining its intimacy and focusing on a limited number of characters.
I saw an important meaning in preserving the novelistic format: not a play based on the novel, with its special dramatic laws, but the novel itself. Not to stand between the author's work and the audience, but to reveal the work itself to the audience.
However, a new question might immediately arise—one I would certainly ask myself: so what's the point of a performance? What's the point of you, its creators?
There's Ishiguro's novel in the original, and there's it in Russian in a superb translation by the late Vladimir Skorodenko, and there are its numerous reprints... and there are its readers, each of whom could easily purchase it and read it at home under a lamp.
What's the point? Why do we need a theater here: a director, actors? What's the purpose of your work?
And I have a clear answer to this question. It arose spontaneously from my frustration—frustration from carefully reading dozens of reader responses to Ishiguro's book and from watching the 1993 film "The Remains of the Day," starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Hugh Grant.
After watching the film and reading the reviews, I was disappointed to see that some parts of the novel seemed to obscure others from the reader's perception—and they also dominate the film's script.
I became convinced that what was most important to me in the novel remains unread, unseen, unperceived, and uncomprehended for others.
The reviews foreground the characters' feelings, their personal fates and their experiences, the emotional moments that etch themselves into their memories. Second place goes to the setting: an old English estate, a large old house, lords, butlers, housekeepers—in short, Purcell's waltzes and the crunch of a British loaf. Everything that the film captures so skillfully and beautifully, accompanied by Richard Robbins's enchanting and deeply moving music.
And all of this is present in the novel. But there's something else there, too, which for most Russian readers, far removed from the twists and turns of British history in the 1920s and 1930s, remains in the background, almost a dotted line, a backdrop to what seems more important because it's more emotional.
And yet, the crux of the matter is there! It's there—in the story of good people who, without realizing it, begin to serve evil.
And when I saw with my own eyes that readers (not all, but the vast majority) don't grasp this, don't reflect on it, and it remains with them after reading, I realized what I needed to do in the dramatization.
To uncover this cross-section of Ishiguro's outstanding novel, the political and historical plot of "The Remains of the Day"—resolutely and ruthlessly cutting everything else, even to the point of cutting down the most significant characters and the most memorable scenes on first reading.
This became my "Obrilovka" (recalling the famous story of how Nemirovich-Danchenko, selecting the episodes staged by his assistants for the final version of "Anna Karenina" at the Moscow Art Theater, would always ask, "Is there an Obiralovka in this scene?"—that is, is there a movement toward the station where Anna would die) for "The Remains of the Day" in "The Nest."
And so, these 3-40 (or 4-15) actually make up less than 20% of the novel. But it is precisely this 20% that Ishiguro devotes to the course of history, the fate of Europe and the world, man in the face of history and his criteria for choosing between good and evil.
Only the author's text, nothing of his own. Although at times we redistributed it among the characters—simply because there were significantly fewer characters. But it's Ishiguro's beautiful language (in Skorodenko's masterful translation), his characters, his story of the butler Stevens and Lord Darlington—these are simply aspects of it that are usually overlooked, but which today (precisely today!) seem extraordinarily important to us.
That's why we move so carefully and leisurely through the novel's pages, why we leave the author's word as much as possible, cherishing every twist and turn of the characters' thoughts, every answer to the big political questions that troubled them then (and us today!) in these troubled times fraught with global upheaval.
That's why the running time is so long. Yes, by doing so, we've made it more difficult for ourselves to win over viewers. But that's what's interesting: not to play for the bottom, but to set ourselves more challenging goals, higher standards, and then try to reach them. This is what motivates us to develop and improve in our profession.
There is an interesting reflection on this topic by Meyerhold, expressed regarding "The Lady of the Camellias" at the GosTiM and recorded by Alexander Gladkov:
"Before the premiere of The Lady of the Camellias, I was in terrible anxiety. Of course: the performance lasted about five hours during dress rehearsals. The administrators looked at me with wolves. I hastily cut some parts, but it was still too long, and, what was most difficult, this quality of the performance corresponded to its style. An attempt at excessive abbreviation would have resembled American extracts from Tolstoy's great novels, these canned fiction. I awaited the meeting with the audience with extraordinary excitement. Would they agree to listen to my leisurely story? And at the premiere, I was moved to tears (these "tears" are not a rhetorical turn of phrase, but a fact!), when I saw that the audience was watching and listening without any visible strain. It was a moment of my greatest joy and triumph. And then these thoughts came to me: a rushed audience is the enemy of the theater. We swallow a bitter medicine, but a tasty one "We savor the dish. We shouldn't abuse the audience's patience, but we also shouldn't cater to the kind of audience that's always 'busy.' If a theater can't make the audience forget about 'being busy,' then does such a theater have a right to exist?"
From myself – Victor Balabanov: "Well said! And beautifully done!
THANK YOU for your creativity, for your co-creation! You're a genius!
A deep bow!
I'd like to publish your text on my website www.victorbalabanov.com in the section 'My attitude to what's happening – to the news'! May I?"
– thus concluded the publication by Alexander Gnezdilov, the author of the dramatization, the director, and the actor who himself played two roles in our "Remains of the Day" Project!
Victor Balabanov (I can't resist writing!):
How important, how great, how TOPICAL!!! Alexander Gnezdilov—such an approach to the novel, to creativity, to the audience... You've given me the opportunity to express my personal view of the psychology of the "vatnik"—albeit an English one, but still a "vatnik," for whom "currying favor" is more important than what leads to tragedy, to the deaths of millions!
....We recently saw a play at a theater that used the hot topic of war, and at the end of the performance, a portrait of Stalin was shown, but not a word, not a word, about the fact that "the mustachioed one," half a month after Hitler began World War II, attacked Poland from the West on September 1, 1939, and Stalin followed his ally's actions from the East, seizing Western Ukraine, the Baltics, and half of Poland! And before and after, the USSR supplied Nazi Germany with oil and metal before the Nazis' treacherous attack on the USSR. By not mentioning, by remaining silent about this history, we are leading to a repetition of mistakes! We need a trial of the Stalin regime!
This is something to ponder as we perceive our "Remains of the Day"!