The Knight with the Melancholy Voice

Vremya MN
“The Knight with the Melancholy Voice”
By Irina Korneyeva
Vremya MN (newspaper), Sept. 21, 2001, pg. 8.

Quixote and Sancho has premiered at the Oksana Mysina Theatrical Brotherhood.

Imagine that you are a Spaniard. Moreover, imagine that you are asked to imagine that by two little actors and that they speak to as if you were a child. Then imagine that you find pleasure in obeying them and the stream of consciousness that makes up Viktor Korkiya?s play Quixote and Sancho which Oksana Mysina has staged in her recently formed Theatrical Brotherhood. (She apparently took inspiration from Oleg Menshikov?s Theatrical Association 814).
It is the directing debut for the actress who also plays the role of Sancho. Apparently a suitable male actor (or one who would agree to play the role) could not be found. This is a contemporary play with contemporary dialogues which, in Oksana Mysina?s opinion, is a contemporary classic. She has great taste. But there is almost no action in this show. Don Quixote?s thoughts have taken over everything. Quixote and Sancho has a subtitle of a “Magical Ritual in the Depth of the Soul,“ in which all the words are capitalized. This is not because the author is suffering from a superiority complex, but because, indeed, this show consists primarily of an internal, rather than an external, world. The metaphysical here has pushed out everything physical. “Where are we?” an actor asks. „In our imaginations” is the answer. In a place where a donkey converses with a steed and the best castanets are an abacus. In Viktor Korkiya?s version, Chekhov was not born, but died in Taganrog which is the name Sancho gives his island — depicted here as a wash basin filled with earth and house plants. Sancho is frustrated. He cannot understand what makes Chekhov better than him. Moreover, unlike Don Quixote, he has landed in the depths of his soul for the first time in his life. Sancho, as the main link among the hidalgo?s thoughts, emerges as the main character in this production. He is prepared to go to battle with windmills in place of Don Quixote; to write a courtly novel; to cherish thoughts of a beautiful lady love and to rethink all of his deeds in light of her imagined existence; to diagnose the total loss of spiritual strength as stemming from a lack of vitamins; and to suggest that man is drawn to woman by nostalgia for the womb. Next to him (that is “her,“ since he is played by Oksana Mysina), Dmitry Pisarenko?s Quixote is not so much a knight of a melancholy mien as of a melancholy voice, a velvety, calming voice that has been heard on radio in the actor?s recordings of Biblical texts. This voice expresses the endlessness of the human soul better than a whole abyss. It remains in the memory more than all directorial tricks and directorial debuts taken together.
„Deep soul” texts of this sort give directors freedom. And help open actors? eyes. And they awaken in spectators a yearning for the unconscious, which, as it turns out in Oksana Mysina?s production, is something you can dramatize.

Irina Korneeva, 21-09-2001