The play is the winner of the Russian National Theater Award Golden Mask following the results of the season 2020/2021 in the nomination Drama/Woman's Role (Anna Blinova - Nana).
The new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, remaining a platform for theatrical experiments and the search for a new theatrical vocabulary, invites directors of different schools and "theatrical faiths" to cooperate. Andriy Zholdak's play Nana based on Emile Zola's novel of the same name is among them.
Zholdak has previously collaborated with the Alexandrinsky Theatre - his play On the Other Side of the Curtain is on the Main Stage, but this is the first time he has directed for the New Stage.
Zholdak is the "shaman terrible" of the theater (in the apt words of theater critic Nina Agisheva), his performances surprise and outrage, confuse the audience from the usual guidelines, change the established ideas of what theater is and what it can be, test the audience for strength, but at the same time immerse them in the context of world culture, as they are saturated with visual and semantic references to cinema, literature and painting.
French naturalist writer Emile Zola (1840-1902) conceived Nana (part of a cycle of twenty novels Rugon-Makkary. Natural and social history of one family in the Second Empire) as a satire on the mores of contemporary society, published the novel in fragments, in the form of feuilletons in one of the Paris newspapers. In some countries the book was persecuted by censors as "offensive to public morals," and somewhere it was banned.
At the center of the novel is the story of Nana, a Parisian courtesan. At her feet threw fortunes, reputations and even lives, sparkled on the theatrical stage, being an expensive kept woman, she dies in a hotel room, having contracted smallpox from her son, abandoned by her former lovers.
One should not expect Zholdak's performance to follow the plot logic of Zola's novel. The director, who has repeatedly stated and demonstrated his indifference to the text as such in his works, reveals a different logic, one that is not narrative at all. His literary basis becomes the starting point for theatrical dreams, fantasies and provocations that explore the depths of the human psyche.
The performance uses a reproduction of the painting "Deer struck by an arrow" by Anastasia Lebedeva (a teacher at the Kosygin Russian State University).
Music by N. Porpora, Johann Sebastian Bach, R. Wagner, Joe Hisaishi, H. Gudnadóttir, C. Cabello, R. Schumann, D. Michaels, D. Kent and others.
Premiere - October 8, 2020
Media about the
In front of us is a crudely built, roughly hewn doll that sings its songs in a squeaky voice, measures the stage by running back and forth in high heels and bends into any, the most sophisticated poses without blinking an eye. <...> But behind the grotesque mask, Nana is a child, a fawn, a girl who is only amused by the power she has over men.
Anna Sologub
Realism and Zholdak rarely intersect, yet Nana is his most "plot-driven," narrative-driven, surreal fantasy-restrained production since his theatrical historical novel Lenin LOVE Stalin LOVE (2008). <...> The play follows the source material, culminating in a gruesome retribution for "illegal" bodily permissiveness, but, fixing the conflict between the "bottom" and the "top", does not rush to conclusions. No justified romance, this is not love, but something stronger; attraction, the language of the body, which is always in action, in perpetual, pornographically uninhibited movement.
Vadim Rutkovsky
