The director is in intensive care, but the premiere will take place: Roman Viktyuk has staged a new performance

Angelica Zaozerskaya

Roman Viktyuk celebrates his 84th birthday in the intensive care unit of one of the capital's hospitals. According to representatives of the Moscow theater Roman Viktyuk, "Roman Grigorievich has pneumonia".

In the evening, his theater will host the premiere performance The Poisoned Tunic based on the play by Nikolai Gumilyov. The outstanding director staged this performance for more than two years, he really wanted to catch the memorial day of Nikolai Gumilyov on August 26. Viktyuk is one of the few masters of our time who has not squandered his talent: each of his new performances is an event in theatrical Moscow. The Poisoned Tunic (Gumilyov's play was published only in 1953) is about love and cruelty, freedom and tyranny, about the confrontation between West and East, about sacrifice and revenge, and these topics have worried the director for all the decades of his creative activity. Shortly before his illness, Viktyuk shared with novye Izvestia his thoughts about our time:

- The world is rolling into the abyss. It is not for nothing that the energy of creativity is lacking at the beginning of the century. Today - the kingdom of emptiness and the world wide web. To fill the void, to fight the void, I staged a play based on the play of the hero and romanticist, poet and prose writer Nikolai Gumilyov, The Poisoned Tunic.

The director admitted that The Poisoned Tunic was conceived while working on the production of "Mandelstam" based on the play by Don Nigro. An American playwright of Italian origin, in love with Russian literature, writes a play about Osip Mandelstam and his executioner Stalin, as well as about the poet's love for Anna Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and thanks to the translator Viktor Weber, Roman Viktyuk finds her, who called the poet “the last poet -the romance of the 20th century:

- If Mandelstam had ceased to possess the poetic word, it would have been torment for him. But he remained a poet until the last second. Therefore, there was no despair in Mandelstam's life. Talent is given as a test, not as a reward, and if an artist withstands this test, then the energy of his work goes to heaven, and does not disappear, otherwise, it falls under the ground and turns into decay and dust. I would call the last poet of the 20th century from our compatriots Joseph Brodsky, but his poetry already has a share of materialism ...

Of course, on the birthday of their teacher, the actors of the theater of Roman Viktyuk will play a premiere, which is called "to rupture the aorta." It is not without reason that Viktyuk calls his actors “stage attendants and warriors of light”.

Novye Izvestia congratulate Roman Viktyuk on his birthday and wish him a complete recovery and return to the theater.