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#14
The Independent (UK)
November 6, 2002
THE HISTORY MAN; THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD RECREATED BY
PUPPETS?
MICHAEL CHURCH MEETS REZO GABRIADZE, WHO HAS BROUGHT HIS TRAGI-COMIC SPECTACLE
TO LONDON
Michael Church
Theatre of war: The Battle of Stalingrad as re-enacted by Rezo Gabriadze's
troupe of marionettes
In old Tbilisi's tight tangle of streets, a new earthquake has greatly accelerated the normal process of decay. Walls have cracked open; houses lean at crazy angles; doors no longer fit. In other words, history has caught up with the master marionettist Rezo Gabriadze, whose cafe- theatre - which might have been designed by Chagal - sits like a symbol of childlike anarchy at the centre of this urban chaos. He built it 20 years ago from material found on rubbish tips. "I thought it was a real shame to call that stuff rubbish," he says. "Everything has its use."
One sees the point of his remark as soon as the curtain rises. Today's show is gnomically entitled The Autumn of My Spring and takes the form of a rake's progress, whose antihero is a brightly coloured bird. His fateful trajectory is marked by a succession of scenes from provincial life: since this is the Soviet era, poverty, disease and corrupt bureaucracy bear down on the characters, whose concerns are with things such as electricity and boots for the winter. The tiny figures on the stage-within-a-stage are themselves made from "rubbish", but they've been modelled with such love, their habitations carpentered with such skill, that suspension of disbelief is no sweat. The puppeteers are conventionally black-clad, but their faces are startlingly white in the surrounding gloom: the effect of this is to imbue their dolls with even greater fragility and pathos. There's also music: a gamey Georgian blend of Stalin-era folk-song and ancient chants, declaimed in ringing tones and urged along by accordion, violin and that magical Caucasian version of the oboe, the duduk. "God gave us lots of different languages," growls Gabriadze beside me in the dark. "They include colour and mathematics, but music is the common language for all humanity."
Every inch the wily artisan, he is at once the master of this music - much of it performed by a sparky group of veterans called Old Tbilisi - and the creator of everything else: he made the puppets, painted the sets, wrote the script. "All the best spectacles are directed and written by the same person. Think of Moliere." Folie de grandeur? No, the allusion is apt, because this man really does belong in the theatre's league of big-hitters. After civil war forced him out on to the road, he was discovered in turn by cognoscenti in Moscow, Switzerland, France and America, and his arrival at the Barbican, London, is now seeing his belated acceptance here.
He and his company have been through the fires. When he returned from exile, he too found himself haggling for electricity and winter boots; his company had disbanded and were roaming the streets. "They're not professionals," he says. "But in my opinion everyone is an actor. This show, set in my home town, Kutaisi, is about life with no money, and about the fact that people with no money are nicer than people who have."
The show he has brought to London is entitled The Battle of Stalingrad. He had been invited to Moscow, been given a big theatre and been asked to do something in it with Russian relevance. "One day I met a friend in the street who asked what I was doing. For no obvious reason I told him that I was going to stage the Battle of Stalingrad. A week later, I suddenly remembered what I'd said, and thought - maybe I actually will do that show." So he found himself reading up about the subject, and visiting Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, he drew on memories from his home town, one in five of whose population fought in the war. "There were many black-clad widows: the place was filled with black blotches. And as is normal in such situations, the best men were killed and the less good survived. So this is a production by the less good members of society."
Isn't that a bit hard on himself? "No, no!" Then he's off into a rumination. "I love looking at the filmed faces of wartime British pilots. They had different eyes, a completely different expression - very similar to the look in the eyes of the people in my town in the Forties. This is why it's so difficult to make credible films about the past - the eyes betray them. Those eyes link that generation across national borders."
He turns out, in fact, to be a passionate Anglophile. The writers who have influenced him include, in addition to the Russian greats and Cervantes, Charles Dickens: his biggest theatrical influence is Peter Brook. "In the Soviet Union, a theatre director was a man who liked to give orders. Peter Brook was the first real director I had ever met, and he showed me what theatre really was. He drew back the curtain for me, showed what miracles could be achieved, with what simple materials, and in what a short space of time." Stalin's great battle on the Volga, he says, was probably the last great primitive battle that history will ever see. "And I render it by primitive means."
The curtain rises on a little pile of yellow sand, out of which an emaciated scarecrow slowly rises, sifting out a red flag and an iron cross while a choir hums a children's song by Schumann. What follows is a series of encounters, some tragic-comic, others simply tragic, offering a worm's- eye view of the war. There are many quiet conjuring-tricks with perspective and scale, and moments when Gabriadze's miniature landscape suggests massive events: a procession of tiny helmets on baking tins may not be the most obvious means of evoking marching armies, but that is what they most eloquently do here. The political commentary is sardonic.
But why should the most poignant relationship in the whole 90 minutes be one between two horses? Gabriadze provides the key. He'd chanced to read an account of the battlefield, which dwelt graphically on the fact that 10,000 horses perished in the fight, and that their corpses littered the ground as far as the eye could see.
"One horse was described as standing on three legs, dragging the fourth. That image haunted me for a long time. Indeed, all those images haunted me, tormented me, until I created this play, this requiem."
When I ask what his next work will be about, he replies - after a pause: "A new fruit was offered to us recently - democracy. At first we thought it was very sweet, and as all Oriental people do, we wanted to eat it up quickly. But now we are breaking our teeth on it. We forgot how many centuries, how many wars, you Europeans had to endure before you could digest it." OK, so he's got a central image. Where will the money come from? "We now have good friends in Switzerland." No local subsidy? "I don't take money from just anybody. Some money in Russia is tainted, even dangerous... But then, nobody gets rich from the theatre, even in your country. I would just like to be able to afford a good bottle of wine and a beautiful scarf." And he laughs at his own spontaneous echo of La Boheme.
The Battle of Stalingrad, Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891) to Saturday
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