A Magnet for Drama

While theaters across Russia are suffering declining audiences and a general lack of interest, one Urals troupe is bucking the trend with a vengeance. Oksana Voronova set off for one of Russia’s grimmest industrial cities and uncovered an unlikely gem. Photos by Igor Petinin.

Picture a theater foyer full of smartly dressed women and men in sober lounge suits, drifting effortlessly around, and a pianist in a white tuxedo playing jazz. There’s a buzz in the air, the expectation and foretaste of something special.

But this is no premiere at the Bolshoy, nor any fashionable gathering at one of St. Petersburg’s more stylish theaters. The location is Magnitogorsk, a southern Urals town spanning two continents, and notorious for a giant metallurgy combine which prompted the nickname “city of a thousand chimneys.”

As you might expect, this city is neither beautiful nor clean – to keep their elegant shoes unsoiled, the aforementioned ladies carry them in plastic bags and change discreetly in a dressing room. There is a tradition in this city of metal-workers to wear one’s best clothes to the theater, look uncompromisingly smart in them and do so on a regular basis.

This theater has another peculiarity. A full house is a rare thing these days, and most Russian box offices can only dream about the early 1990s theater boom, when the freedom to say once-prohibited words literally sucked in the crowds. Now, the further you go from the two capitals the more meager the audience. Unless, that is, you go to Magnitogorsk, where there is a good chance you won’t see a spare seat in a week of performances.

What makes this phenomenon so noteworthy is that it is happening in a provincial city, one without much of a history or cultural tradition. Magnitogorsk was built in 1929, almost as an afterthought, to house workers at the combine. Of the town’s population of just under half a million, most are employed at, or indirectly involved with, the combine.

This would hardly seem to be fertile ground for practisers of the theatrical arts, but then what could be better than good theater for taking people’s minds off the grimness of their everyday lives?

“There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do apart from work, watch TV and sleep,” said Svetlana, a 35-year-old kindergarten teacher attending a recent musical premiere at the town theater. “So it makes a real difference with theater – you get a taste of real life. Particularly if it is like this musical, beautiful and cheerful, it makes you so happy.” Her husband, meanwhile, admits that he is much more interested in hockey and was half asleep during the performance. As long as it keeps his wife happy and has a good influence on the younger generation, though, he is very positive about the need for theater in the city.

Its place in the city’s cultural life aside, the story of Magnitogorsk Drama Theater is very dramatic on its own – a never-ending story of a struggle for survival.

It all began in 1990, when unrest began in Tadzhikistan. Valery Akhadov, director of the capital Dushanbe’s Russian Theater, decided that it was not safe to stay in the city. With Tadzhik nationalists becoming increasingly powerful, nothing Russian was welcomed and there was no reason for a Russian-speaking troupe to stay around.

So Akhadov took an unprecedented step – he applied to various Russian cities with requests for a theater to work in and accommodation for his actors. Three cities replied in the positive, but only Magnitogorsk’s municipal authorities were prepared to provide living space for the whole troupe and also the financial support needed to keep the theater going.

At that time, Akhadov was already well known as a film and theater director and it would have been easy for him to find a better and safer place to live and work on his own. But he believed survival was only possible if the troupe stayed together. So they headed for Magnitogorsk, ecological nightmare and bastard son of the earliest Five Year Plans.

By then, the city’s own municipal theater had been defunct for eighteen months – only a few actors were left and it had no future at all. So the newcomers were met with some scepticism and no one believed it was going to last long.

That was six years ago. Now Magnitogorsk has become a very lively cultural center. There have been one film and two theater festivals, and new plays are regularly produced, most of which attract critics from the national press. What makes it all even more unique is the work there of a number of western theater professionals, which even Moscow generally has difficulty attracting.

Akhadov has no qualms about provincial theater upstaging the capital. “Provincial theater? I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean,” he said. “The theater is the theater. Wherever it is, it should strive to be the world leader. Provincialism is inside you, not outside. You need to be in tune with the world.”

There is no better way to let the theater audience get in tune with the world than to bring them a real French star. Annie Girardot of La Comedie Francaise is very popular in Russia. She came to Magnitogorsk to perform Madame Marguerite, an intense one-hour play full of passion, despair and hope. Despite the fact that her monologue was in French, she managed to keep the audience’s attention to the end.

Girardot’s visit, though it was the highlight of the 1994 season, was rather short. However, another serious French actress, Anne Seliere, spent just short of three seasons in Magnitogorsk. She perfomed both in Russian and French, stayed in a seedy local hotel and received the same basic salary in rubles as local actors. She got used to the cold weather and said that the hardships of life in the city did not bother her.

“I love everything connected with Russia – the theater, the literature, the people,” said Seliere in Dramatis Personae, a book about the theater by local critic Vladimir Mozgovoy. “It’s a very valuable experience to get to know the Russian theater school from within. I like the way Akhadov works and we are considering some future French co-production projects.”

True to his idea of being in tune with the trends of modern theater, Akhadov invited Martha Mason, an American modern dance choreographer. Mason staged a modern dance performance of Bitva (Battle). For drama actors who knew little about classical ballet, let alone contemporary dance, this was terra incognita indeed.

Big names from the West are a perfect illustration of Akhadov’s policy of attracting audience attention. He feels a responsibility towards the city. While this is the only drama theater in Magnitogorsk, the local theater-goer is still entitled to diversity and the opportunity to compare. Various genres, not just drama and comedy, but also musicals and children’s plays, are staged there by various directors, both local and from further afield.

But with a troupe capacity for staging four to six new plays a year and each play having a life expectancy of about 60-80 performances, it is hard to provide something new constantly. That is why festivals, entirely new for Magnitogorsk, were introduced.

The first biennial theater festival “Theater without Frontiers” featured mainly stars loved by the public on its guest list. The second, for which tickets were sold out months in advance, drew lesser-known local theaters from all over the country. Akhadov recognizes that these were not meant to be profitable events and their main value was to promote the theater and the reputation of the city.

Sensing the public mood, in 1994 Akhadov initiated the “Crystal Tear” cinema festival of melodrama.

“I think melodrama is the most important genre for Russia now,” he said. “When life is so hard that people literally have to fight for their existence, this popular genre encourages feelings of kindness, softens the heart and gives hope.

“The festival was aimed at the general public,” he continued. “It was not of the type where filmmakers get together to admire themselves. For ten months we were regularly bringing films with the authors. There would be two showings and then the next group would come.”

Thus Akhadov and company are giving the city the chance to see the best recent films from Russia and the former Soviet republics. The importance of this event becomes clear in the context of the complete paralysis of the domestic film distribution system: new films are being made but hardly ever get shown outside Moscow, while provincial cinemas are either boarded up or show cheap, poor-quality foreign films.

The audience greeted one of the films of the melodrama festival with a standing ovation. You are the Only One, by Dmitry Astrakhan, is the dramatic story of a couple in their 40s who felt lost with the beginning of reforms, when the situation in the country changed so suddenly. They felt useless and betrayed (as in fact did most of the country’s population at the time) and their love was under threat.

These tears of despair and happiness, a victory of finer feeling and real values, were the highlights of the festival, desperately needed in a city where life is all about metal and nothing else. Akhadov knew he was making a difference: “When I saw to what extent the audience appreciated all our activity here I knew it was worth staying here.”

However, he is constantly involved in various theater and cinema projects with other theaters and spends most of his time outside Magnitogorsk. And while Akhadov remains director-in-chief and the public face of the theater, there is also a manager, Vladimir Dosayev, who actually makes it all happen and is the secret of the theater’s success.

Having been director of the local philharmonic for five years, Dosayev was offered a job by the newly-arrived Akhadov. He agreed and became, at 32, the youngest manager in the theater’s history.

“We started everything from scratch,” Dosayev remembered. “There was no money, no production facilities, no repertoire, nothing really. It was very difficult but also very exciting. But when you set uncompromisingly big goals, when you have an idea and really want to bring it to fruition – there is nothing that can stop you. And then you see the result, when people appreciate what you are doing ... this is our main reward.”

The theater is on the municipal budget, and, with the country in economic crisis, things cannot be easy. Most local companies do not pay taxes because they are paralysed by mutual debt, so the city authorities are unable to provide the theater with real money. What it gets instead is “wechsels” – documents that state that the theater owns a certain amount of ore, metal or other valuable goods.

Many cultural venues in Russia with the same kind of problems prefer to complain to the media and blame government and politicians for neglect and failure to provide financing. But Magnitogorsk Drama Theater continues to set its own goals and work hard to achieve them.

“The main message of all our activity is that we are here, we are alive and we are still working,” concluded Akhadov. “And if by being here we are still able to bring joy and act as a safety-valve to people, then perhaps that is the most important thing to justify our existence.”  RL

Oksana Voronova was recently a producer for the BBC Marshall Plan of the Mind (a charitable trust which makes educational radio and TV programs), doing several documentaries in a series called Touchstone (Tochka Opori) for Russian television, focusing on outstanding achievements in various fields in the new Russia. One of the programmes will feature the Magnitogorsk Drama Theater.