MOSCOW, March 15, Pavel Surkov. An actor of incredible dramatic range, who could look natural on the stage, on the theater stage, and in cinema. Alexander Shirvindt’s charm was truly cosmic proportions, and his pranks were legendary. I can’t believe he’s leaving at all, because it seems like this is just another joke of his, just completely unfunny for some reason.
Theatrical legend
Alexander Shirvindt was fantastically handsome and charming. Thousands of fans fell in love with him, and he, maintaining an imperturbable mask, only threw out another witticism, which the same fans happily caught. media-type=»photo» data-crop-ratio=»0.73558648111332″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»441″ data-source-sid=»» class=»lazyload» lazy=» 1″ />
On the stage of the Satire Theater, to which he was faithful for many years, he easily entered into any repertoire, not afraid of even the most difficult acting task. When Valentin Pluchek in “The Inspector General” deliberately distorted both the appearance and the organic nature of Shirvindt, gluing his huge gummous nose to Dobchinsky and forcing him to stutter, depriving the actor of his excellent diction, Alexander Anatolyevich was at his best here too, betraying the strongest organic nature of the “little man”, the lost official with his dreams of an inaccessible, but so attractive metropolitan life.
His duet with Mikhail Derzhavin, his amazing partnership with Andrei Mironov — all this has become a legend. And the troupe of the Satire Theater was one of the most stellar in the entire USSR. And when in “The Marriage of Figaro” Shirvindt — Count Almaviva gracefully fought with Mironov-Figaro, hearts skipped a beat with delight right up to the last row of the gallery. And even now they freeze—just rewatch the recording. And maybe there was even some symbolism in the fact that it was in this performance that treacherous death took away Andrei Mironov from the life and it was Shirvindt who found himself at that tragic moment next to his best friend.
Then, having already headed the Theater of Satire after the departure of Pluchek, he will stage “Andryusha” — a touching revue with the participation of all the surviving artists of that same legendary troupe: a memory performance, a farewell performance, an homage performance, an enthusiastic dedication to Mironov, tickets for which are simply it was impossible to get.
Samurai calm
He was open to any experiments, he allowed everything to his director friends: here was the restaurant hack from Ryazanov’s “Station for Two,” and the one-eyed chess player from Zakharov’s “12 Chairs,” and Efros’s elegant and cynical Don Juan. Well, in his native theater he allowed the widest range of roles — from the tragic Ornifl in the play of the same name to the magnificent duet with the faithful Derzhavin in Gorin’s “Schastlivtsev-Naschastlivtsev”.
His most recent theatrical work was the aging actor in Rodion Ovchinnikov’s play “Where are we?”, an image truly Fellinian — tragic, dramatic, and comic. The following performances were scheduled for spring 2024.
Ahead of the obituary
He once ironically remarked: “Here we are, artistic directors of Moscow theaters, we are over 80 years old, and if we add up our ages, then we are older than Moscow.” And then he easily left the leadership post at the Satire Theater, handing it over to Sergei Gazarov, but at the same time retaining the position of president of the theater. Yes, we must give way to the young, all he could do was laugh at his own age. He even called the latest edition of his memoirs “Ahead of the Obituary.” With all his characteristic irony, he continued not only to flirt with the inevitable, but to look into eternity with samurai calm and youthful mischief.
Interviewing him was even more of a challenge: he knew how to turn every question into a pun, either going into memories, of which he had an endless supply, or building some kind of cyclopean series of irony and sardonic jokes. Until his last breath, he believed in the triumph of the theater, without leaving the walls of his beloved Satire, sincerely worrying about it and hoping for the universal triumph of art. At the same time, any pathos was alien to Shirvindt. And as soon as it was a question of a prank of any kind, he instantly got involved in the game, his eye lit up like a good fellow, his imagination worked uncontrollably — and witticisms and puns rained down.
Today, perhaps, we still do not feel the scale of the loss. We mourn our own past, where we begged for tickets to the last rows of Satire in order to look at “all of them”: Shirvindt, Derzhavin, Mironov, Papanov, Menglet, Mishulin, Vasiliev, Tusuzov… This incredible stage ensemble, in which Shirvindt brightly soloed, seemed , understood each other perfectly, and in the heavenly troupe, gone into eternity, the last artistic gap has now ceased to gape.
Probably, having read these lines, he would have frowned and muttered: “Well, they’ve piled up something here again,” he puffed would have waved his hand with his eternal pipe and gone to the stage to which he had given his entire life without a trace.