This chamber performance was created as part of the Experiment Space program, and is an effort of young director Sergey Chekhov to find a stage equivalent to the language of the great Russian writer Andrei Platonov.
The plot of the story The Potudan River is simple at first glance: Nikita Firsov, a Red Army soldier, comes home from the Civil War and tries to start life anew. But Platonov organizes this text as a complicated stream of meanings and motives, intertwining pagan and Christian images with the Socialist ‘New Man’ idea. The main character’s mythopoetical travel from the world of the live to the world of the dead and back becomes the mover of the story. And it is this year-long process of “return”, with constant falls “back,” that becomes the plot’s key conflict.
For Platonov, love for a woman is a synonym to life itself; this feeling only becomes a new hope and salvation.
Balancing on the verge of drama, visual, and physical theater, and using today’s media and sound technologies, the performance strives to depict the fragile permeability of the Platonov world. Staying in the reality of our days, director Sergey Chekhov interprets the story in the spirit of the “new serious,” without sneering at Platonov’s ideals.
The cast members are leading masters of Pskov’s theater: Yuri Novokhizhin, People’s Artist of Russia; Viktor Yakovlev, Honored Artist of Russia; Nadezhda Chepaikina, Honored Artist of Russia; and the theater’s choreographer Ilona Gonchar. For the masters, as well as for the audience, it is a meeting with theater aesthetics new for them – an unexpected creative adventure.
