Konchalovsky

Last year the acclaimed Polish actor Daniel Olbrichsky turned sixty, and the mayor of Warsaw gave him a present he still hasn’t gotten over: he could pick any theater, any play, any actors, any director, Olbrichsky would play the lead, and the city would cover all expenses.

Olbrichsky asked Andrey Konchalovsky to direct, and together they chose King Lear.

What follows is a translation of an interview with Konchalovsky that appeared in Московские новости on 2 February 2006.

The Moscow News correspondent [Valery Masterov] asked how long Konchalovsky mulled over the offer from Olbrichsky.

—I agreed immediately. First of all, Daniel is a huge actor on stage and screen. I hadn’t had a chance to work with him, and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. Second, right now I’m drawn more to theater, especially the classics.

—So you took the commission without any doubts?

—There were some doubts about which play to choose. We thought about Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen. But we preferred Shakespeare, who was the first I’d ever directed. King Lear is a very difficult piece, and I thought: If not now, when?

—You’ve said many times that traditional culture is dying and that, in this context, the classics look absurd. And yet you chose a classic.

—When I speak of the assault of postmodernism, it’s Europe I primarily have in mind.

Nowadays they present the classics in abundance, but transfer the action to different places and times. Fashionable directors want to attract attention to themselves — the author of the play is, for them, a pretext for self-expression.

—In the Polish press they wrote that the leitmotif of this Shakespeare play—the rejection of absolute power and the collapse of the monarchy—can be seen as the disintegration of the Soviet empire.

—People can write whatever they like. You want hints? Look for them. It’s people living under totalitarian regimes who go to the theater to find hidden political references.

What my Lear is about I’ll venture to say after the tenth performance, at the earliest. I tried to understand what the author was trying to say. Shakespeare wasn’t answering questions, he was asking them. And so the viewers will ask themselves questions, which, after a good performance, basically reduce to a question about life: What does it all mean?

—How much time did you spend preparing for this production?

—I started preparing for it forty-five years ago. Work on any production consists of everything you’ve done previously. And the experience of King Lear will undoubtedly enter into preparation for the next production.

—What was your working relationship with the Polish actors? You’ve said there’s a curtain between Russia and Poland, dividing our culture, mentality, religion …

—And the curtain will always be there. Just as between, say, Russian and Estonia. In Moscow there are loads of theaters, one and the same culture, but the rancor is indescribable.

It’s possible for people to belong to the same culture and detest one another, but it’s possible to present different cultures and love one another if you work together on the same task.

—You weren’t bothered by the fact that the actors were taken from popular Polish television series?

—Daniel handled the casting. The actor must be good, first and foremost. And good actors earn money, unfortunately, in various ways. You can’t make a living in the theater, even playing Shakespeare.

—But people who are used to TV shows will come to see familiar actors, not Shakespeare.

—The main thing is that they come and that they think.