Wiener Festwochen 2010: Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! - To Moscow! To Moscow!

Wiener Festwochen 2010: Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! - To Moscow! To Moscow!
Frank Castorf / Anton Chekhov\r\n

Date: 11 jun to 13 jun, 19:30
Venue: HALLE E+G / HALLE E

Play / Moscow, Vienna, Berlin / Premiere in the German-speaking region
BY Frank Castorf, based on Anton Chekhov\'s Three Sisters and Peasants

Chekhov\'s Three Sisters and his novella The Peasants are intertwined by Frank Castorf in To Moscow, to Moscow. This collision of Russian bourgeois lethargy with the anger of the disenfranchised reveals the revolutionary potential that fuelled the 20th century.

Anton Chekhov wrote his greatest plays in the Crimea. Three Sisters shows the world of the bourgeoisie circa 1900 in all its congealed stiffness. Conditions are still stable, land and privileges are split up among oligarchies. But there is a pervasive feeling of uselessness. While the sisters want to work and have a say in the future, they lack practical experience. They yearn for faraway places: \"To Moscow, to Moscow\". But the dramatist was also familiar with the situation of the poorest of Tsarist Russia\'s poor. In his 1897 story Peasants, Chekhov perceptively describes the Russian proletariat: these people rant and drink, they are coarse and rough, illiterate and uneducated, \"like cattle\". The peasants, too, want to move to the metropolis because being poor in the city still seems better to them than being miserable in the country. Frank Castorf will blend and adapt the two texts. Intersecting the mentalities of the disenfranchised with the lethargy of a still privileged but dying society uncovers the potential that fed the revolution and opens a perspective into the 20th century.

Frank Castorf, a regular guest to Wiener Festwochen since 1991, has been the artistic director of Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin since 1992.

copyright:
© Thomas Aurin