Marvelous performance in Kolozsvár (Cluj Napoca - in Transylvania) of the play of Checkov directed by a Romanian director; Andrei Şerban. The sense of his love of the space around us. Genius ideas are the most simple solutions. Strike of a genuis is to explore them.
First we sit on the edge of the stage facing the round shaped auditorium. The actors are sitting scattered in the rows. Here takes place the first act. They climb, jump, run and balance around in the whole space, over the balustrade of the chairs, up on the banister of the balcony... There's a dance at the end, which describes with few sharp gestures the relations between the characters. Afterwards Sonia and Vanya stayes seated in the rows, all lights fade, exept for the lightbulbs of the huge chandelier in the middle. It slowly starts to descend right above Vanya. It is not a fluent movment, it jolts as the machinche is making it come down.
It stops in a little distance above him. First the yellow lightbulbs go out, and there's only the cold blue light of a round neon just above him, and finally it fades aswell.
Light comes back, and Sonya and Vanya are showing us, we should enter the stage.
During the second, third and fourth act we are seated in the middle of the big stage. The flies above stage is enthrallingly high. All the space has athmosphere of an enormous workshop, a place where people do their work, with the raw materials: ropes, iron tubes and other constructions, spotlights, and walls made of bricks. They play around us: at the edge's of the stage on small platforms, in the glass cabin of the stage-manager (with a stong red curtain on the backwall of the cabin), above on the technician's balconies (there are two balconies above each other in around 25 - 40 meters high), on the small backstage; and between us: all chairs are in a distance from each other - the actors walk in between them several times, in most of the cases they were telling monologues there.
The backstage is curtained off at the begining of the second act, you do not expect that something will happen there aswell. Later, suddenly you hear it starts to rain over there. They pull up the curtain, you can see a small model of a house surrounded with mud. The rain is falling here, it is illuminated with cold lights coming sharply from certain directions - creating a big shadows on the faces, when the actors enter into this mud. There are shelves behind, they are divided into small boxes. On some of them files, and some others - as you can discover later - live doves. On the performance, which I have seen they started to move in the best moments, when their wing-beat supported the meaning of the actor's sentences in a batiful, poetic way.
When actors go into this backstage, they get covered with mud, and wet from the humidity of the rain.
It is played in Hungarian (by Hungarian actors), but everything is subtitled in Romanian. Even the begining and the ending of each act is projected. There are tv-screens everywhere around showing all subtitles, all the time.
Elena, the wife of the professor turns her speach into different languages, mostly English, and sometimes French and German aswell. Others take over from her, an answer her in the language, what she used: to please her, to be ironic with what she have said, to show they have same accomplishments, as she does.
The whole evening carries irony and beauty at the same time. Deeply lived situations, but a distance from each event. The close and empathic relation to the situation and story of these people, but a show being in theatre all the time.
At the end the safety curtain mounts, and actors leave to the auditorium to bow. They are playing, standing up in different places of the auditorium to bow - more and more behind, they even go up on the balcony and slowly disappear behind a row of chairs. We - the spectators - are standing up on stage and applauding for the actors, who are waving for us in the auditorium.
I have seen this performance with big luck and a lot of benevolence of very kind actress. We were hitch-hiking from Saint George (Sepsiszentgyörgy) with Bence till Cluj, we were longing to see this performance, because we heard very good comments about it. I got the phonenumber of an actress, Péter Hilda, who was working at Saint George, but now she is at Cluj, and acting in this performance. There is double cast, that evening Hilda was not playing. She made some calls for us to get some places for us, but they told her, there is no chance. The seats are limited, and there were already extra chairs for that night. But still we met in front of the theatre, and she was leaving no stone unturned to fit us in. I have met her once before. And in the last moment we got the last seats. She got a chair aswell, and stayed. She said, she loves this performance so much, that she can not leave it, if she is there.
First we sit on the edge of the stage facing the round shaped auditorium. The actors are sitting scattered in the rows. Here takes place the first act. They climb, jump, run and balance around in the whole space, over the balustrade of the chairs, up on the banister of the balcony... There's a dance at the end, which describes with few sharp gestures the relations between the characters. Afterwards Sonia and Vanya stayes seated in the rows, all lights fade, exept for the lightbulbs of the huge chandelier in the middle. It slowly starts to descend right above Vanya. It is not a fluent movment, it jolts as the machinche is making it come down.
It stops in a little distance above him. First the yellow lightbulbs go out, and there's only the cold blue light of a round neon just above him, and finally it fades aswell.
Light comes back, and Sonya and Vanya are showing us, we should enter the stage.
During the second, third and fourth act we are seated in the middle of the big stage. The flies above stage is enthrallingly high. All the space has athmosphere of an enormous workshop, a place where people do their work, with the raw materials: ropes, iron tubes and other constructions, spotlights, and walls made of bricks. They play around us: at the edge's of the stage on small platforms, in the glass cabin of the stage-manager (with a stong red curtain on the backwall of the cabin), above on the technician's balconies (there are two balconies above each other in around 25 - 40 meters high), on the small backstage; and between us: all chairs are in a distance from each other - the actors walk in between them several times, in most of the cases they were telling monologues there.
The backstage is curtained off at the begining of the second act, you do not expect that something will happen there aswell. Later, suddenly you hear it starts to rain over there. They pull up the curtain, you can see a small model of a house surrounded with mud. The rain is falling here, it is illuminated with cold lights coming sharply from certain directions - creating a big shadows on the faces, when the actors enter into this mud. There are shelves behind, they are divided into small boxes. On some of them files, and some others - as you can discover later - live doves. On the performance, which I have seen they started to move in the best moments, when their wing-beat supported the meaning of the actor's sentences in a batiful, poetic way.
When actors go into this backstage, they get covered with mud, and wet from the humidity of the rain.
It is played in Hungarian (by Hungarian actors), but everything is subtitled in Romanian. Even the begining and the ending of each act is projected. There are tv-screens everywhere around showing all subtitles, all the time.
Elena, the wife of the professor turns her speach into different languages, mostly English, and sometimes French and German aswell. Others take over from her, an answer her in the language, what she used: to please her, to be ironic with what she have said, to show they have same accomplishments, as she does.
The whole evening carries irony and beauty at the same time. Deeply lived situations, but a distance from each event. The close and empathic relation to the situation and story of these people, but a show being in theatre all the time.
At the end the safety curtain mounts, and actors leave to the auditorium to bow. They are playing, standing up in different places of the auditorium to bow - more and more behind, they even go up on the balcony and slowly disappear behind a row of chairs. We - the spectators - are standing up on stage and applauding for the actors, who are waving for us in the auditorium.
I have seen this performance with big luck and a lot of benevolence of very kind actress. We were hitch-hiking from Saint George (Sepsiszentgyörgy) with Bence till Cluj, we were longing to see this performance, because we heard very good comments about it. I got the phonenumber of an actress, Péter Hilda, who was working at Saint George, but now she is at Cluj, and acting in this performance. There is double cast, that evening Hilda was not playing. She made some calls for us to get some places for us, but they told her, there is no chance. The seats are limited, and there were already extra chairs for that night. But still we met in front of the theatre, and she was leaving no stone unturned to fit us in. I have met her once before. And in the last moment we got the last seats. She got a chair aswell, and stayed. She said, she loves this performance so much, that she can not leave it, if she is there.
