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Or not to be
Eifman Ballet’s Russian Hamlet
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The Young Prince watches as the Favorite of his mother the Queen dispatches the King. He broods, like Hamlet. His mother finds him a Bride, but the girl has designs on the throne. The Favorite tries to seduce the Bride by way of distraction; when that doesn’t work, the Queen has the Bride killed. The Queen attends a play in which a masked woman and her lover murder her husband; when the Queen removes the character’s mask, she finds the Prince. The Ghost of the King appears to the Prince and, in the Prince’s fantasy, takes revenge on the Favorite. Death finally claims the Queen, but the Prince, who’s now King, is as dependent on her as ever.

A new Robert Wilson production at the ART? No, actually, it’s the story of Pavel I, son of Catherine the Great, as told by Boris Eifman’s Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg last weekend at the Wang Theatre. The company was here two years ago with the psycho-bio Tchaikovsky: The Mystery of Life and Death and then Red Giselle, the story of émigrée Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtseva; last weekend it returned with Russian Hamlet: The Son of Catherine the Great and Don Juan & Molière. Pyotr Ilyich may turn into Pavel Petrovich, but the Eifman æsthetic remains unchanged: stunning tableaux; stunning sets; rhythmically angular dancing that draws as much from gymnastics and from figure skating as it does from ballet; overbearing taped music; and drama that borders on melodrama, its histrionics undifferentiated from one character to the next.

The story of Tsar Pavel I does have vague Hamlet overtones. His father, Pyotr III, became tsar in 1762, but he ruled for just six months before his wife, Catherine, and her lover Grigori Orlov had him deposed and then killed; at the time, Pavel was just eight. Catherine ruled until her death, in 1796; Pavel then became tsar, but in 1801 he was assassinated in favor of his son, Aleksandr I.

History becomes dream in Russian Hamlet, where it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy. Grigori Orlov is transformed into the Claudius-like Favorite, but in reality Catherine had many lovers. And a more appropriate title would be Prussian Hamlet: Catherine was a Pomeranian princess; Pyotr’s father was the Duke of Holstein; and both of Pavel’s wives (the first died in childbirth) were German. As the continuation of the Romanov dynasty, Aleksandr (not mentioned here) is seven-eighths German. The Hamlet connection is forced: Catherine took the throne after a public coup, and her husband’s death a week later of " hemorrhoidal colic " was just business as usual. It’s not even certain that Pavel was Pyotr’s son; Catherine spent more time with her lovers than she did with her husband. Eifman’s Pavel is the consummate moody prince, but bereft of Shakespeare’s verbal genius, his sufferings are generic (perhaps this is why Hamlet hasn’t been turned into a ballet). Aleksandr might have proved a better subject: in the course of his reign (1801-1825) he gravitated toward Christian mysticism; when he died, rumors spread that he wasn’t really dead; and when, a year later, his coffin was opened, it was found to be empty.

Eifman has set Russian Hamlet to Beethoven and Mahler (Germanic, of course), mostly the heavy, dramatic stuff: the Storm from Beethoven’s Pastorale, the Egmont Overture, the Funeral March from the Eroica, the outer movements of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony (three, maybe four funeral marches in all), large chunks, but still false to the composer’s intent. And the Wang sound system made it all seem even bigger and brasher.

As for choreography, the Eifman approach stresses the kind of moves that Russian pair and ice-dance skaters have popularized, with lots of acrobatic wrappings and unwrappings but not much classical footwork. The corps move mostly in sharply articulated unison, occasionally in canon against a principal character. Slava Okunev’s set looks like the tilted-up gilded dome of a grand hall, and the dome cuts out to allow for observation (that is, spying). Some of the tableaux are breathtaking: Death with its black shroud surrounding and finally enclosing Catherine on her throne; the dead tsarina processing across the stage and carrying Pavel, who’s curled up on the end of her long gold train, out with her (this to the lyrical second theme from the Finale of Mahler’s First Symphony, an oddly muted conclusion). The opening-night dancers — Yelena Kuzmina as Catherine, Igor Markev as Pavel, Albert Galichanin as the Favorite, and Alina Solonskaya as the Bride — were ecstatic. But we’ve had more engaging Catherines from Mae West and Jayne Meadows and Jeanne Moreau — even from Marlene Dietrich and Catherine Zeta-Jones. And if this is the " undiscovered country, " give me Shakespeare’s Denmark.

Issue Date: March 14-21, 2002
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