The Seagull

With support from the Moscow Department of Culture

This is an exercise in seeking a new way to approach Anton Chekhov’s play. It was headed up by three young directors working in tandem with the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.

Three views, three ways of deconstructing the text, three versions of events. Each director stages his segment of the play in his own style. Yury Muravitsky creates a fashion show, in which each character wears his or her lines as they might a costume; Yury Kvyatkovsky is interested in actors’ improvisation, where the spoken text is not fully fixed, and the duration of the scenes depends on the energy and personal desire of each performer; in Kirill Vytoptov’s version, the characters meet their contemporary twins – heroes of 20th-century pop culture – and it all takes place at night in a bar. Each of the directors performs Treplev in one of their colleague’s segments. Treplev, of course, is very the image of a young experimenter, through whose eyes we see what is transpiring. Common to all three directors is the contemporary artist’s desire to enter into dialogue with the most important play in the Russian repertoire, and the podium, into which the Electrotheatre’s Main stage is transformed.