|
Chekhov Concert Presented by The Open Theatre Studio The production includes three short stories by Anton Chekhov: The Darling, The Lady With the Dog, and The Black Monk. These are the stories of people from the turn of the XXth century, people who are lost in their dreams and escape from reality. Chekhov’s dreamers, refined aristocrats and commoners, naïve and extremely intelligent, loving and lonely, are the generation of the pre-revolution era filled with melancholy, the generation who lived with a sense of the end of the ‘cherry orchard’ epoch, the generation that will be later on dragged into the tragic events of the First World War, and then swept away by the Revolution and the Civil War. Referring to the concert in the title of our show we are presenting Chekhov’s stories in the style of a ‘concert version’, a performance with limited staging, sets and costumes, where drama is mixed with music by Mozart and Russian romantic songs. Another tradition we are linking our performance with is recitation, first reading, or open rehearsal. First reading is one of the key stages of working on a production, when the actors familiarise with the texts and explore the plots, themes and characters of the literature material. Contemporary theatre often invites the audience to share this experience and introduces the performance as “work in progress”. We are following this trend and invite the spectators to “read” Chekhov with us.
|
|
||||||||
The production includes three short stories by Anton Chekhov: The Darling, The Lady With the Dog, and The Black Monk. These are the stories of people from the turn of the XXth century, people who are lost in their dreams and escape from reality. Chekhov’s dreamers, refined aristocrats and commoners, naïve and extremely intelligent, loving and lonely, are the generation of the pre-revolution era filled with melancholy, the generation who lived with a sense of the end of the ‘cherry orchard’ epoch, the generation that will be later on dragged into the tragic events of the First World War, and then swept away by the Revolution and the Civil War. Referring to the concert in the title of our show we are presenting Chekhov’s stories in the style of a ‘concert version’, a performance with limited staging, sets and costumes, where drama is mixed with music by Mozart and Russian romantic songs. Another tradition we are linking our performance with is recitation, first reading, or open rehearsal. First reading is one of the key stages of working on a production, when the actors familiarise with the texts and explore the plots, themes and characters of the literature material. Contemporary theatre often invites the audience to share this experience and introduces the performance as “work in progress”. We are following this trend and invite the spectators to “read” Chekhov with us.
|
