THE LONELINESS OF EIGHT

The Azerbaijan State National Drama Theatre held a closed performance, based on a play by Elcin; the premiere took place on 4 April. The play is called "Among the Bees". The playwright himself defined this play as an "Irony in Two Parts". The director is prominent artist Bahram Osmanov.

The main subject of plays by contemporary playwrights, whether overtly or between the lines, is the loneliness and alienation of people in a big world. No mobile telephone or secure Internet connection can unite souls which have lost the habit of normal communication. Metropolitan society has been agonising the problem of alienation since the time of Dreiser and O'Henry. Loneliness is an evil not confined to the big city, as Chekhov brilliantly revealed. Popular writer Elcin continues this glorious tradition, showing how our contemporaries and countrymen are tormented by the same invisible evil.

The plot is not complicated: at weekends, a husband and a wife take their son, their daughter, their son's wife and daughter's husband to see their grandfather, who has been living 240 km from the capital for some time, having established an apiary somewhere in the mountains. The family sets out for the mountains to the accompaniment of Farac Qarayev's cheerful and optimistic music. Up in the mountains, where people are closer to the sky, know each other better and display greater depth in their characters. As the finale approaches, the music becomes increasingly more tragic, because the grandfather's loneliness in his favourite apiary, among the bees he loves, is simply paradise compared to the loneliness within the large and noisy family of his descendants. The director presents, as graphically as possible, the everyday aspects of unfolding events and the strange phantasmagoria of the vision of one of the characters. The audience is made keenly aware of the parallels between people and bees and these parallels are far from pleasant. The  title itself takes on an especially ironic tone as the action unfolds.

The production designer is Altay Sadiqzada. The performance is indebted to him for its amazing, chameleon-like sets, which illumine equally well the pseudo-abstract daub on the narrow walls of a city apartment and the high, spacious and sunlit mountain spurs. The costumes are also interesting. These characters are our contemporaries and, going by their clothes, there is no difficulty in figuring out who belongs to which type of character, long before the first cues characterize the characters in some way. This applies particularly to the female characters, whose costumes are sometimes even changed.

The central characters of the play are the Grandfather and the Nurse, but the burning flame of popular actress Firangiz Mutallimova lights up the whole performance, drawing the audience's attention to her character, whom the author simply names the Wife. And we have to say that she is just a wife and nothing else. But is this not enough? Firangiz Mutallimova's character is a typical woman who torments her husband with her jealousy, her children with her imperiousness and the domestic animals with her endless embraces while, at the same time, loving and pandering to everyone. The actress's temperament clearly suits her character, while the local colouring of her behaviour completes the portrait of a typical city woman.

Of course, she clearly overshadows her partner (actor Cafar Namiq Kamal) in the scenario created by the author. He is also very recognizable, this is the Husband - a henpecked husband who has an affair on the side, but hides it from his wife, as with so many other things - his thoughts, feelings and plans. But even he cannot stand the cavils of his wife, exclaiming: "I think that Eve ate the serpent,  and not just the apple!" But still, this Husband, as played by Cafar Namiq Kamal, is no less attractive as a human being than his wife. Simply, this role was painted in watercolour, while his Wife is a bright fresco which Mutallimova's talent lights from the inside, turning it into a luxuriant stained glass.

The overgrown children - all four of them - are less sharp and ironic, but bolder than the adult couple. From the outset, all is writerly exaggeration here. If we continue the comparison with painting, this is a real comic. Weightlifter Zulya is uninterested in anything but sport, translating the meaning of life into "record weights", while the ecstatic Lala is one of those girls who feel sorry for a "poor and innocent lamb", but happily wolfs down a kebab. The unfortunate businessman Topus has never learned to use his brain, or even earned the right to be called his own name rather than a nickname, while the chorister Caba, who is just a little frightened of his own wife, is actually more afraid of losing his voice than anything else in the world. The actors who play these roles bring their own distinct contributions to the characters. Rasad Baxtiyarov gracefully, but with some flaws, creates in Caba a caricature of a spoilt and sickly mother's boy, supplementing this with wonderfully apt gesture. Elsan Cabrayilov, on the contrary, does not endow his Topus with anything so sharp. His character is as grey as that of his father - the Husband (it is difficult to say whether this is the intention of actor Cabrayilov or whether it happens by chance). But, while behind the greyness of the Husband, you discern a weak, but sensitive and intelligent man, behind the greyness of Topus, you cannot see anything: he is a completely two-dimensional character, as if in a shadow play. At the same time, no matter how terrible this is, he is recognizable… Of course, you may view this as a comment on the spiritual impoverishment of many of our contemporary youth.

In this aspect, the actresses outstrip the actors. Zulya, played by Sahla Aliqizi, is very cheery (in every respect). This sportswoman, who appears stupid at first sight, is no pushover. She has an explanation even for her unsuccessful choice of a husband (upon her mother's advice): that it is time to get married and that she herself is content with this. She does, however, shift responsibility for the choice onto her own mother, because the burden of responsibility is too heavy, even for a weightlifter. Nevertheless, compared with the other, quite flabby, "children", especially the guys, the "energizer" Zulya comes across as a very attractive character. You may be dazzled by her eternal exercises, but this "perpetuum mobile" considerably enlivens the action on the stage.

Perhaps, among the offspring of this family, only Lala looks livelier than Zulya, thanks to popular actress Munavvar Aliyeva, who invests her character with the grotesque. Her Lala is a terrible parody of the pseudo-intelligent girl who cries at a sunset, writes voluminous poems and admires the croaking of frogs.

This parody is evil, sharply delineated and extremely exaggerated, which is why Lala is the only character who comes across as unnatural. It is very difficult to judge who has grasped the essence of this play more clearly - this actress or the others. But the fact remains that a wonderful parody is at odds with the general thrust of the play: to meet as far as possible, the playwright's requirement to "be ironic".

In contrast to the other characters, the central couple form a surprisingly harmonic unit. The Grandfather and the Nurse (actor Nuraddin Mehdixanli and actress Matanat Atakisiyeva), two old and lonely people, have found each other in this infinite world, while everybody else, on the contrary, has lost touch. Their age does not allow them to look to the future with exaggerated or na?ve hope, but they also do not lose hope. The actors skilfully disclose the internal transformation of their characters. This occurs via the peculiar and tragic vision of the Grandfather and the Nurse's artless story about herself. Another "character" - the wind - appears at the end of the play. It blows the past away. But what will it bring? For all the certainty of the plot, there is an open-ended finale.