I may call Moscow theaters timid about staging contemporary writers, but, at least in terms of Russian drama, this town looks like a radical haven compared to the rest of the world. I recently ran an unscientific, but telling, check of Russian plays running abroad and made an astonishing discovery: Most of Earth believes that Russian drama is a 19th-century affair. Guess who is everyone's favorite?
Anton Chekhov, and his play "The Cherry Orchard" in particular, is omnipresent. In recent months, it has been performed at the Teatro Lliure in Barcelona; has been performed by the English Touring Theatre; is being mounted at the Royal National Theatre in London with Vanessa and Corin Redgrave for a September opener; and has been turned into a play about post-apartheid Africa called "The Free State," a co-production of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
A production of Chekhov's "The Seagull" closed at London's Barbican in May, while a version of his "Three Sisters," updated as a story about a Scottish family, ran at the Royal Lyceum in Scotland. In Washington D.C., the Stanislavsky Theater Studio put on a show called "Doctor," based on Chekhov's stories.
Other Russian writers produced in Canada, England and the United States are Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. Of these, Gorky's "Summerfolk," which ran at the National, was the "newest." It was written in 1904. The only contemporary writer I found in my survey was Alexei Burykin. His 1993 play "Nijinsky" was mounted at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki as a dramatic production.
Paul Williams, a columnist for the London magazine Plays International, recently complained about the "seemingly endless trendiness of large-scale Russian ensemble work." Indeed, what else could one expect when the playlist is so musty?
So, next time you want to complain about the paucity of new Russian writing in Moscow, remember it could be worse.
f John Freedman
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