«The Double Bass» based upon Patrick Süskind famous novel Der Kontrabaß («The Double Bass») directed by Gleb Cherepanov is one of the main stage productions of Moscow Art Theater repertoire. The first was on the 1st of March, 2014 and for almost three years «The Double Bass» has been one of the most bestselling and most demanded on tour performances with the theater halls always overcrowded by devoted fans of Konstantin Khabenskiy.
The director Gleb Cherepanov: «Our performance is about the death of talent and desintegration of an artistic soul. The most awful thing — to deceive yourself, to take part in unliked activities, to communicate to people who are nobody for you, to live not on your own… Sometimes this «modus vivendi» leads to sorrowful consequences. The performance is dedicated to Music — the top of the life values for the character of Konstantin Khabenskiy. There is almost none of music in our performance but you can hear unespected sounds.»
The theater version of «The Double Bass» may be called a mono-performance but the director asks not to define it in this way: Konstantin Khabenskiy is not alone on the stage. The director and the artist put the goal to avoid the monology and the drowning in literature — the inevitable result of work of the artist with an enourmous amount of text. There is not any choreography in the performance but its creators tryied their best for showing the text through physical action, understood without any words, alike «The Great Silent», full of grotesque, tragicomedy, tragedy. It is not an interactive talk to the audience, the impermeability of the story is fully preserved.
Different special effects and mechanisms of the big stage of the Moscow Art Theater are used in the scenography by Nickolay Simonov, but the world in which lives his live the Double Bass player is closed, stuffy and impenetrable. His apartment is at the same time the isolated music studio no noise from outside is admitted. But inside its artificial world anything the Double Bass player gets in touch with, can be got into life, make sounds, bacame the object of play, a kind of a toy for a lonely person. The final is full of surprise for the audience not following the story written by Patrick Süskind.
THE PAGE OF DOUBLE BASS PERFORMANCE ON THE OFFICIAL SITE OF MOSCOW ART THEATER