Lyubimov’s ‘Boris’ Finally Plays Moscow

Six years after the state censors said no, Yuri Lyubimov’s production of Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” has finally opened at Moscow’s Taganka Theatre.

Why was it banned? Vadim Gayevsky, writing in Soviet Theatre magazine, says that the reasons aren’t quite clear even now. Supposedly the objections were that Lyubimov was up to his usual “antics,” that he was treating Pushkin’s text in cavalier fashion and that “doing ‘Boris Godunov’ without sets is all wrong.”

But now that the production is actually on the boards, Gayevsky finds that “these arguments hold no water: Pushkin’s text has been reverently preserved and the delivery is better than any in living memory.”

So what was the objection to Lyubimov’s staging of the play? Gayevsky suggests that the real problem was that it was too clear about Pushkin’s ideas on state power and its corruptions.

“Plays about state power in crisis had long been banished from Soviet stages, with the exception of glib thrillers set somewhere in Latin America or South Africa. One could imagine the confusion that (the production) provoked in some officials and the panic in their offices.”

All this before glasnost --of which Soviet Theatre magazine, under its current editorship, is a good example. The new issue has an editorial about Stalin (“Debunked, he still strikes fear in us”) and a long feature about Mikhail Shatrov, whose plays were also “hot potatoes” during the Brezhnev era, now known as “the period of stagnation.”

The magazine is published quarterly, in Russian, English, Spanish, German and French. For a subscription, write to VAAP, 6a Bolshaya Bronnaya St., Moscow 103670.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THAT: Like snakes discarding their skins, actors shed their last part without a qualm. Sometimes they’re so relieved to be free of it that they start bad-mouthing the character. Here’s Tyne Daly, in the Washington Post, on Mary Beth Lacey, her character on “Cagney & Lacey.”

“Mary Beth wasn’t a nice woman. Did you think she was a nice woman? I think she was a really limited woman with a lot of faults, a lot of bad stuff. She was a mud hen. What did she want? She wanted dining-room tables. She was afraid.”

Now Mama Rose, whom Daly happens to be playing in “Gypsy” this season--there’s a right-on woman.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “A disaster is nothing more than a dumb idea that has gotten funded”--James De Preist, director of the Oregon Symphony.