There are ten of them, all different from each other, each with a revenge to take. No longer young, not really pretty, ready for anything, including participating in a beauty contest of which the winners will be hired for a cabaret in Singapore. They come from the heart of rural Russia, could come from anywhere, everywhere, where lives are crushed beneath frustration. But it is with extravagance and an absolutely Russian energy that they will attempt to force the hand of fate. In vain, of course. It's already too late and anyway, one does not tear oneself away from one's past so easily. What has been lived has been lived. It is indelible, but after all, life goes on, and dreams don't die.

Yannic Mancel: Based on your personal experience as artistic director of the Saratov Theatre, how would you define the state of the Russian theatrical scene today?

Anton Kouznetsov: My impression is that everywhere, in Moscow, in Saint-Petersburg and in the provincial cities, some "good work" is being done, but there is a huge danger, that we call "enterprise", that in French would probably be given the name "boulevard", in other words, "farce". The problem is that it is high quality farce. But farce, you know how it is, it always begins with a certain quality, but later, unfortunately, it deteriorates. For a theatre manager, this kind of theatre has many advantages: it has no difficulty quickly becoming profitable. Now today, there are, at the highest level of the State, political leaders who think that, if we follow this pattern, the theatre could soon - and favourably (!) - do without subsidies: a godsend! According to this scenario, our audience, which has always been so active and critical and still is today, would quickly become passive consumers. So I am very worried when I hear certain theatre managers in Moscow, seeking popularity, declare that the future of Russian theatre belongs to liberalism, like the rest of the economy. In such circumstances, when I announce a "French season" at the Saratov Theatre (Maupassant, Béranger, Genet, Koltès, Bailly and so on) and when I put the accent on the contemporaries, I seem like a dangerous eccentric.

Yannic Mancel: But then, if your theatre is so demanding and difficult, how do you attract your audience and, on a more mundane level, fill your auditorium?

Anton Kouznetsov: I have only held the position here for not quite three years. So I still have the benefit of the state of grace that goes with renewal. Not being very old myself, I am fortunate to attract a young audience. Saratov is a very important university town. Russian students are very curious. They spontaneously consider the theatre makes up a part of their education, their awakening to life and to the world. They have not yet adopted the attitude of consumers. Their dreams, like ours, have not yet been destroyed: we are equal, ready to take risks together on the discovery of a new playwright or a new director.

Yannic Mancel: So your gamble is to create a new generation, an entirely renewed audience?

Anton Kouznetsov: Not quite, as we still retain a loyal following among a cultured intelligentsia who continue to have the desire to go to the theatre but whose incomes are too modest to be able to attend "enterprise" theatre. They continue to support new artistic experiments, new attempts, and they participate actively in the development of theatrical thinking broadly speaking, that corresponds to the generation of my parents. The only difficulties in dialogue that we encounter correspond to the intermediate generation, that of the thirty-year-olds, who hesitate, no longer recognizing themselves in the enthusiastic appetite of the students, nor able to identify with the serene diligence of their elders.

Yannic Mancel: For us to get to know you better, would you mind recalling for us your career before your appointment here, which was, in fact, a return to your birthplace after, I believe, a long, prestigious wandering, via Saint-Petersburg and Paris?

Anton Kouznetsov: I was born in Saratov. I completed my secondary schooling at the "English College", a school specialised in the teaching of foreign languages. Then I entered the Graduate School of Dramatic Art, where I spent four years learning the profession of actor. After getting my diploma, I worked for a whole year in Saratov, founding a Studio Theatre, under local government control, which is known today as the ATX. I was then admitted to the Theatrical Academy in Saint-Petersburg to study stage direction, in Lev Dodine's class. By chance and good luck, it was with my year that Dodine had the idea of staging Gaudeamus, a training production that we toured all around Europe for two years. At the end of my four years of studies with Dodine, I met my wife, a student at the TNS school, and I worked with the group XXVIII on Chekhov's short stories. We settled in Paris and I began to work at the Odeon Theatre of Europe, first as an actor in Gorky's Summer Folk, then as assistant to Lluis Pasqual. I even followed him all through his career as opera director: Falstaff in Amsterdam, La Traviata in Salzburg, then a second version of Falstaff in Seville. I was also able to present at the Petit Odeon an adaptation of a story by Nabokov, Camera Obscura.
Another chance was to have been invited by Dominique Pitoiset to create Pushkin's minor tragedies in Dijon in the context of the festival "Théâtre en mai". It was with this production that I was awarded my diploma from the Saint-Petersburg Academy, and which I was also able to present in Saratov, thanks to the exchange of Russian and French seasons that Patrick Sommier organised in 1995. It was also in this context that, finally, I was chosen to assist Georges Lavaudant for the Russian re-creation of Lumières at the Maly Theatre in Saint-Petersburg: that was the start of my friendship with Jean-Christophe Bailly …
Back in France, I created a company which I called "Babel", not only as a tribute to the author of Marie and the Odessa Stories, but also to insist on the various origins and nationalities of those who had accepted to join the adventure. Our first creation was, as to be expected, The Red Cavalry and other stories, by Isaac Babel himself, and it was produced in Dijon again, in the context of "Théâtre en mai".
Then, the director of the Saratov Theatre asked me to come and stage Gorky's The Lower Depths, after which, during the summer of 1998, the representatives of the State and the actors of the company, unanimously, asked me to become the "artistic director" of the theatre, a position which until then did not exist. In less than three seasons, we have been able to stage fourteen plays, structured by an artistic line which has developed essentially along two central themes: contemporary Russian writers, and the discovery of French literature and repertoire.

Yannic Mancel: The Saratov Theatre is a company theatre. I have heard tell of thirty-six permanent actors. Are you in a position to tell us, after almost three years experience, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this permanent company?

Anton Kouznetsov: I am a child of Russian theatre, and Russian theatre has always been a company theatre. For me, this is an enormous advantage, as this is what makes the theatre like a home, which makes it live like a home, a family … All generations live there together. And when we succeed in reuniting them around an artistic project, we can't avoid reaping huge benefits from these differences in sensibility, these exchanges of experience.
The danger in Saratov, because it is so far away from Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, comes from the fact that the actors don't have the possibility of diversifying their activities in television, cinema or radio. The risk becomes that of a withdrawal into the theatre and into oneself, that the dressing room ends up becoming an extension of the kitchen or the bedroom … The only way of avoiding the pitfalls of family life - habit, routine, boredom, an excess of familiarity which ends up destroying astonishment - is for the company to be able to work with different directors, whose particular methods create surprise, arouse desire, and reveal the actors in a new light. In this case, the artistic director appears as the guarantor of the artistic line, and the invited stage directors are the guarantors of variety and renewal. In any case, it must be understood that independence and intermittent work would be impossible in Russia today. We do not yet have at our disposal the social structures which would make them economically possible.

Yannic Mancel: Among the contemporary writers that you have chosen for these first three seasons, there is one who, in professional circles at least, is beginning to be a little better known in France, Alexandre Galine. Who is he for you and why did you choose him?

Anton Kouznetsov: Galine is representative of the maelstrom Russia has found itself swept up in for the last twenty years or so now. His work, which first appeared in the final years of Soviet power, has always given rise to debate and scandal. Highly disturbing and always progressive, it has developed over the years to the rhythm of the changes in Russian society itself, but always takes a contrary view. Galine is part of a tradition of classical Russian dramatic art, that of polyphony and chorus, but always putting a concern for humanism before that of the avant-garde. He is a playwright with a quite exceptional talent for bringing characters to life through their age, their personal history and their social condition. This was observed from the very first play which made him known, Les Etoiles dans le ciel du matin, (Stars in the Morning Sky) a play which, immediately, without the benefit of hindsight, dealt with the Moscow Olympic Games of 1984 and, more broadly, the early difficulties of perestroika. The play tells how, during the Games, to hide them from the view of organisers and tourists, all society's outcasts were confined in camps far away from Moscow: prostitutes, all levels thrown in together, from high-class call girls to drunks, the homeless, drug addicts, drug dealers and the rest. Now, in spite of the terrible things that were happening inside this concentration camp, only one thing, in unison, motivates all this mixed little population: to climb on the roofs of the huts to watch the Olympic flame pass, the only sign they have left of the universal glory projected by the Games onto Moscow and Russia for a few days.
The image of the light, the flame, the stars, the morning sky, beyond its realistic and concrete description, refers of course to a metaphorical, historical and political interpretation: the dawn of perestroika. And then, we can also detect already in this play one of the permanent features of Galine's writing, that is to say, his ability to listen to women. For him, society is constructed by women. He has no equal for listening to and retranscribing the suffering and the dreams of women on the scale of a whole society, as if the capacity to be mother amplifies the echoes of the fundamental problems of humanity.
With Le Concours, twenty years later, we find again the same dramaturgical principle of a micro-society representing the evolution of a whole people. Today, in Russia, every member of society passes an exam or a competition every day. Everything has become competition. With us, from now on, society is divided into two categories: those who keep up and those who are thrown out …

Yannic Mancel: What is strange, but is also peculiar to a work in progress, is that, from Les Etoiles dans le ciel du matin to Concours, with twenty years separating them, we find common themes, with their variations and their evolutions from one play to the other: a sporting competition, "aesthetic", and in the end social; sex marriage, prostitution, the white slave trade; money the import of foreign currencies, export, the mafia, minor trafficking.

Anton Kouznetsov: And all these themes end up blending into one only, the fundamental one, that of doubt and the identity crisis: a human being ends up doubting that he is a human being. Must we enter the social game that is forced upon us without asking questions, or on the contrary, live our own life? To the contest imposed by the social competition imported from Japan or Singapore, it is better to oppose with one's own examination … of one's conscience. The speech of the working-class mother, in the end, refuses to choose between both utopias, communist and capitalist. Le Concours is a play about an ideological crisis: what to believe in? who and what to trust?

Yannic Mancel: Alongside these existential questions which are of a philosophical nature, and the ideological questions which are of a historical and political nature, these women also have scores to settle with their husbands, their fathers, and men in general, and the formal means used by Galine to account for this revenge by women comes at the same time under psychodrama, farce, or even "boulevard"…

Anton Kouznetsov: In most of his plays, Galine starts from the feeling of women that they are nothing, anonymous in the crowd and in society, and he allows them to acquire, through a test, awareness of being someone.

Yannic Mancel: You approach the question of aging, and the anxiety it provokes in women, with tact and delicacy …

Anton Kouznetsov: All I did was take as a starting point the reality of the company and the existential, artistic or professional worries felt by some of our actresses who, with maturity, reached a turning point in their life and their career. However, for one of them, I went a little further and with her, I took a real artistic risk. She to whom I gave the role of the working-class mother, a seller of vodka and virtually homeless, had been known until then as a great tragedienne, heroic and "noble". But the gamble paid off, and she thanked me for having allowed her to demean herself and to make herself look ugly in this way through this new character. She has played a large part in making all these women great and beautiful, even to the point of deepest humiliation. It's also what allows us, in spite of the subject of the play, to avoid the pitfall of disgust and vulgarity.

Yannic Mancel: There is always a lot of music, singing and dancing in the plays you direct. Is this typically Russian, is it a characteristic of the artistic current you relate to, that of Lev Dodine, or is it simply your personal taste?

Anton Kouznetsov: It's a little of all of this at the same time. I love dance and I have recently engaged an actor, Aliocha, a specialist in the study of contemporary dance, to become the choreographer of the theatre. Twice a week, he leads a choreographic workshop that is compulsory for all the actors in the company, and he is also responsible for the physical warm-ups. It's the same for choral singing and playing in the orchestra. All these additional activities, which we then find in the plays, should, in my opinion, be seen in relation to the high level of amateur practice in our country since the Soviet period. My father, for example, whose profession as an engineer has nothing to do with the arts, is also an accomplished clarinettist, and this an example I've had before me since childhood. For me, Russia is first of all a world of sounds, of music, of rhythms and of body movements. In this lies a very material and concrete aspect of what you call the Slavonic spirit. Like the Spanish and the Irish, we have popular dances whose steps are deeply rooted in the earth, with feet stamping on the ground and drawing their energy from this.

Yannic Mancel: So, with you there is the temptation of the "total" production, which includes all forms of stage expression?

Anton Kouznetsov: Yes, this is why I am very attracted to Brecht and his operas. My medium-term ambition is to lead the Saratov Theatre company to create The Threepenny Opera. We are slowly getting closer, but I know there is still work to be done.

Yannic Mancel: If we observe carefully your choice of repertoire, we notice that ideology, history and politics are in the forefront of your occupations …

Anton Kouznetsov: What I am going to say is perhaps very subjective and probably extreme, but personally I sometimes have the impression of being at war with Russian society and its theatre scene. Everything that I propose takes an enormous amount of energy. Everything becomes grounds for and the stakes in a battle. I would like to say to people, based on my theatrical practice, that money can't do everything. I want to make a modest contribution, starting from the critical assimilation of our past, to defining a new hope.