Chekhov in three beats. Chekhov in three movements of the soul, similar and different.Ivanov, a play written in his youth, is the story of a "tired" man. Ivanov has given up on everything, on his ideals, on his wife who is dying slowly from an incurable illness, on his job. Life and love come calling though. So will he respond to the young and wealthy Sacha who has made it clear that she loves him ? He lets potential happiness slip through his fingers and withdraws from existence, suddenly. This painful, fatalistic "alien", Chekhovian character is whole, and the creation of a 27-year-old writer. The Seagull is a work of maturity, a crossroads, a concerto of crises. The young Constantin has not had any literary success and his girlfriend Nina leaves him to become an obscure actress. His mother, Arkadina, is a well-known actress, but less skilled in motherhood. Finally, the writer Trigorin, her lover, is a talented poet, but lacks that special edge. They are all failures in their own way, all their destinies interwoven. None of them is really cruel, but they seem to manage to love badly with the result that the most sensitive are struck by the most absolute cruelty. The play deals with the impossible task of human beings understanding each other or finding a point of convergence, and at the same time looks at the condition of the writer and the actor, broken down by indifference and solitude. Each of them is at the same time a fragile bird like the seagull and the hunter that kills it.Family Circle for Three Sisters is a workshop production based on Three Sisters, a play that Chekhov wrote three years before his death. The accounts of three sisters who are bored with their life in a provincial town and dream in vain of leaving for Moscow, is not represented in a linear way, but in fragments, as if in rehearsal, exploring to seek justification for the pursuit of a certain direction, highlighting the collective roles of the actors by their cues or their roles, while developing a kind of intuition. There is no clear line between the acting space and the audience. Family Circle is the hidden side of theatre work, the revelation of the fruitful disorder of rehearsal, fascinating in their sketches and many possibilities. The actors in Family Circle form in fact the structure of a house of dead people caught between memory and oblivion. Eric Lacascade has subtly adapted Chekhov's plays. He has made them less weighty and has altered them so that they bear the imprints of a modern age, of today. Their context referring back to yesteryear has
disappeared. All the decor disappears ! All that is left are the human beings who are extremely contemporary, overwhelming and funny, and whose hearts beat fast and bleed in front of us. Lacascade tries to get in between those intimate cracks and those suspended emotional moments, leaving behind that slow traditional music. He puts into practice Chekhov's words "I begin slowly, and at the end, bang ! In the face" !
Distribution
stage direction Eric Lacascade
script : Vladimir Petkov
cast : Jean Boissery (Piotr Nikolaïévitch Sorine), Arnaud Churin (Ilia Afanassiévitch Chamraïev), Murielle Colvez
(Irina ArkadinaNikolaïévna), Alain D'Haeyer (Evguéni Sergueïévitch Dorn), Catherine Epars (Paulina Andréïevna),
Christophe Grégoire (Konstantin Gavriolovitch Treplev), Stéphane Jais (Sémione Sémionovitch Medvédenko), Eric Lacascade (Boris Alexéïévitch Trigorine), Christelle Legroux (Macha), Daria Lippi (Nina Mikhaïlovna Zarétchnaïa)
decor : Patrick Demière, Eric Lacascade
costumes : Antoninette Magny
lighting : Thierry Sénéchal
assistant : Pierre-Michel Marié
sound recording : Joël Migne
Production
production : Centre dramatique national de Normandie/Comédie de Caen, Festival d'Avignon, Les Gémeaux-Sceaux/scène nationale, Théâtre de Cherbourg/scène nationale, Le Rive Gauche, Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, Office départemental d'Action culturelle du Cavados (ODACC du Calvados), Festival de Théâtre de la Région Haute-Normandie
avec le soutien de : Conseil régional de Basse-Normandie, Conseil général du Calvados, Ville de Caen, Ville d'Hérouville Saint-Clair, Office de Diffusion et d'Information artistique de Normandie (ODIA Normandie)