The title of the play "The Time to Live (The Fantasmagoria of Love by EM Remarque)", in which the artists familiar to many artists are engaged, always caused me to associate with the military themes of the novel of the novel of the same name, but I could not correlate images on posters with this theme . In fact, the play is the production of another of his novel - "Life on loan", and when I realized this, everything fell into place.

If I am asked to name a few favorite foreign authors, then definitely among them will be the name Remarque. Like all the work of this writer, both the novel "Time to live and the time to die" and "Life on loan" are permeated with gloomy decadence, black irony over life and the smell of death, but "Life on loan" seemed to me the most depressing novel of all that I I read from Remarque. Literally every sentence in it speaks of death, and even in those moments when the heroine hurries to live, buying dresses from Balenciaga or breaking into a new place, she does not forget about what death really is, that this small piece of life is taken in all only on loan.

"Even from the time of the sanatorium, she knew that sometimes it is harder to look at things deceased than on him."

The atmosphere of the play is less oppressive, it has more desire to live than fear to die, and therefore I see such a choice of the name as the arrangement of correct accents from the point of view of the directors. The heroine (Nattya Martynova) practically did not live the last eight years: first four years of war, and then the same - a tuberculosis sanatorium. Almost all of her youth was surrounded only by death. The play begins with the funeral of her friend by illness: the eyes of the heroine are closed with a bandage, and the deathbed is shrouded in a gauze shroud. She is all alone, rushing about in the dark and beating about the shroud like a moth caught in the net, but just one unintentional gesture with which the hero (Maxim Khanzhov) removes the bandage from her eyes, suddenly forces the hero to see and clutch at him as she grabs a straw drowning. With the advent of this man, at last the time comes to live.

She would have loved him, if it had not been for the desire to escape far from the sanatorium, we do not know. But the time to live, not to exist, the heroine gives this particular man, he is the embodiment of that short-lived race for life, which she left, that's why the performance ends on the plot before the novel. Further agony would have become superfluous.

"Nothing helped, she felt that next to her in the earth a failure was formed - a chasm without a bottom. She could not forget about this for a second. "

Like any parable, the play is filled with many allegorical images, embodied by two plastic figures performed by Sergei Khudyakov and Zinaida Nekrasova. They convey the inner world of heroes with the help of gestures, movements, and without words play the other characters of history, and are original guardian angels and angels of death.

The brilliant work of the artist and choreographer is supplemented by a sincere acting game. Only four people on a small stage, only two of whom speak (and sing) with words, hold the whole hall for two hours. They are real, not faked, and even sometimes the overly dramatic manner of Natalia does not seem superfluous, because this is absolutely her role.

His play reminds me of the "Transparent Colors" that I recently looked at, which is no wonder, because the team of directors is the same: the director Valery Vladimirov, the artist Alexei Ulanov and the choreographer Sergei Khudyakov. However, "Time to Live", in my opinion, is more complex, multi-layered, postmodern and lighter. Despite this, both productions were so carefully treated with the primary sources that you can drive schoolchildren to learn the material.

And I am very pleased that the team, which has come out of high-profile expensive projects of mass orientation, can and does such deep authorial productions.