Tugging at Russian heartstrings

A throwback to Soviet state culture, puppet theatre is still popular in a growing Moscow

A throwback to Soviet state culture, puppet theatre is still popular in a growing Moscow
Giggles and whispers ripple through the darkened auditorium. The curtain slides open, and the inevitable scolding voice cries out—the babushka, self-appointed custodian of child-rearing and decorum. “Quiet, now, people paid good money.”

Gulliver’s ship tumbles dizzily onstage, suspended on sticks, tossed on glistening waves of chiffon. Soon he’s shipwrecked, a hulking figure taken prisoner by the tiny Lilliputians. Now Gulliver is a papier mache head the size of a taxicab, small puppets squeaking around him. The show melts into a two-hour optical illusion, juxtaposing hulking puppets, human beings and hand-sized figurines on the same stage to convey an impossible jumble of scale.

It’s another night at the Obraztsov State Puppet Theater, a throwback to Soviet state culture, the popularity of which remains undiminished as Moscow grows faster and slicker around it.

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“The possibilities for puppet theatre surpass ordinary theatre. You can create anything,” says Andrei Luchin, the head of the theatre. The theatre seems lost in another time, sheltered from the grim march of Russian history. When the puppets jerk and dance on the stage, the air is laced with old fairy tales and firesides and flights of winter fancy.

“I still play little girls, and nobody sees that I am old and already have grandchildren,” says Alexandra Gorbunova, 58, rustling backstage in pink petticoats. The puppeteers work six days a week, Gorbunova says, and take home paltry pay—the average salary is less than $430, slim sustenance in the world’s most expensive city. Still, they throw themselves into the shows and consider themselves actors.

At the 77-year-old puppet theatre, many spectators seem to be looking for a piece of something they remember. Yelena Kotova frets that her 5-year-old granddaughter is growing up in England and losing her Russian. Every year, when the girl visits, she is brought straight away to the puppet theatre.

Hundreds of puppets from all over the world haunt the theatre’s museum, frilled and aged and gnarled, cased in glass. There is a workshop where craftsmen make papier mache shoe buckles, stitch together tiny, perfectly tailored costumes and worry over how to hinge a wooden jaw so it has just the right dash of insouciance.
The company also stages Pushkin, Kipling and sharp works of religious satire. Every New Year’s Eve, Muscovites throng the auditorium to see the trademark production, the 60-year-old “Unusual Concert”.

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The theatre was the creation of Sergey Obraztsov, the puppet master who remains one of the world’s most celebrated innovators of the craft. Today his granddaughter, 52-year-old Yekaterina Obraztsova, directs shows at the theatre. It’s her production of Gulliver’s Travels; she slips into the auditorium as the show gets underway, draped in beads and silk scarves, nervously scanning the full house.

“Kids now live a different life, they see a lot of attractions and a lot of animated cartoons. The tempo of their lives is different,” Obraztsova says. “But for some reason in the puppet theatre, they adjust to a different rhythm and they’re happy to fill the space, to watch and understand.”
_Megan K. Stack, LATWP