We it came to be known that Moguchy is working on “The Storm”, a masterpiece of Ostrovsky, our Shakespeare from the Zamoskvorechye, ones heart dropped at first. Will he be able to pass these “Wuthering Heights”, will it all turn into lightning and thunder? Frankly speaking, Moguchy and Ostrovsky are quite distant and have no interlinks, as Volga and Kama rivers. But regardless of all our worries, it became a true theatre event. Of course, everyone is astonished firstly by Moguchy’s intention to pack Kalinov in a Palekh casket. If we look back, we will have to face the fact that Meyerhold’s staging of “The Storm” in the decorations of Alexander Golovin, a member of the Mir Iskusstva artistic movement, once made Kugel lagh, saying that it looks more like the world of berendeys from “The Snowmaiden” then Kalinov of “The Storm”. But here in the production by Moguchy, where everything is full of souvenir beauty, there are no imaginary berendeys, no kitsch a la Russ. We see Palekh, but there is nothing souvenir-like about it! Is this even possible?
Moguchy together with his colleagues, firstly with the composer Alexander Manotskov and the musical director Anna Veshnyakova, worked on the textual material, adapting it to their goals: they added some ethnics – some dialects of the Volga region, some of it is real, some invented by the production crew, and this original atmosphere prevented “The Storm” from having a souvenir-like glow to it. Katerina’s speech is nothing close to the academic reciting of theatre school graduate, she sounds like a native of the Volga banks, pronouncing all words with a softened ending… Ostrovsky’s original text is transformed into folklore ritual mourning songs and rhymes, dialogues in verse. When the actors speak, almost every time we hear the bass drum in the background (Nikolay Rybakov), and it not rhythmically organizes the spoken verse, but also brings on the sound of a rising storm. Very soon the storm will fall upon them all, the storm Katerina hears so much and the one Kuligin is not a bit afraid of, because, in his own words, it’s just “electricity”.
From the review by Olga Galakhova “Towards the Storm”
