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Lisa still has not died at giving birth, and prince Andrei is still preparing for active service in the Army. The rehearsals of the famed Tolstoy epic at the "P. Fomenko's Workshop" took approximately seven years. Slowly, but with preoccupation, And so they play: with detail, enjoying every thoroughness, sticking to details. In that detailing, nevertheless, there is not an ounce of the heavy, old-fashioned routine theatre. It is not about dramatisation, but playing the novel in this example. Lightly, barely touching them, the actors leaf through the book's pages and, instead of drawing portraits, simply outline the silhouettes of Tolstoy's heroes. Almost everybody plays several roles in the play. Even that "fickleness" has a charm and allure of its own. The "cold-blooded" beauty Elen Kuragina and Natasha Rostova, the mischievous little devil, unstoppable like mercury, appears in role of Polina Kutyopova, Ksenia Kutyopova acts with equal persuasion "the most charming Petersburg resident", countess Lisa and orphan Sonya, the little grey mouse, cordially taken in by the Rostov family. The undeniable lioness of the world Ana Pavlovna Sherer, the doting hen and the caring mother of a large family and the little princess Marya, the hermitess, the "bright-eyed" girl - these are the three roles Galina Tyunina painted with clear, masterfully clear strokes. The sophisticated coolness of the drawing-room talks and the touching uncouthness of youthful confessions: the desperate goodbye at

the edge of a scream of the old Bolkonsky prince and the senseless women's fight; the sweetness of a home pastoral and the grotesque apparitions of the doctors - vultures gathered around the dying count Bezukhov: life in all its fullness and illogic takes place on stage. The lightness, lyricism and magic entwine in an incredible fashion with nonsense, stupidity and mercilessness of the human life. Behind the false weightless fabric of the play, woven by actors on stage, the contours of the mass of Tolstoy's novel can be caught in sight. War and Peace. The Beginning of the Novel is the title the authors have given to the piece. War is but a topic for drawing-room conversations and boyish plays, but the heart already shivers at the thought of the frailty and unreliability of peaceful life taking place on the narrow strip of a stage between the theatre hall and the map of military actions which serves as a curtain for this play. PYOTR NAUMOVICH FOMENKO Born July 13, 1932 in Moscow. Graduated from the "Gneisni" music school and violin at the Ypolitov-lvanov Academy, Graduated from the Philological Faculty at the "Lenin" Moscow Pedagogical Institute in 1955, and from directing at GITIS (his class was picked by I\l. M. Gorchakov, and class masters were N. P. Ohlopkov and A. A.Goncharov), During the sixties Fomenko directed plays in various Moscow theatres: at the Central Theatre for Children, the Theatre on Lilttle Brona, the "Leninskie Gori" theatre studio at the MGU, the "Maiakovsky" Drama Theatre in Moscow and the Drama and Comedy theatre on Taganka. In the year 1966 at the "Maiakovsky" theatre Fomenko did Tarelkin's Death by Sukhovo-Kobilin, suffused with absurdity and the