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The three playwrights presented together in this volume On the Road to Ourselves), Elena Gremina (Behind the Mirror) and Olga Mikhailova (Russian Dream). The selected plays contain many elements which will appeal to Western directors and audiences: well-drawn characters, engaging plots, lively wit. Central to the three plays selected in this volume is a complex interaction of Russian and Western value systems, a theme that becomes increasingly relevant for Russian audiences with each passing season and no less relevant for Europeans and Americans.
Off Nevsky Prospekt is the first study to be published in English of the exceptionally rich and diverse theatre studio movement which has flourished in St Petersburg during the 1980s and '90s. Professor Markova charts the development of the theatre studios - from their beginnings as a reaction to the repressive atmosphere of the Soviet period and through the "theatre bacchanalia" of the Perestroika years. She then surveys today's vibrant scene, with analyses of key productions and interviews with many of the central figures, and describes how theatre studios have subverted the conventions of the past to create a new dialogue with the changing society from which their audience is drawn.
Catherine the Great (1729-1796) wrote over two dozen plays and operettas, but not until this edition has a complete translation of any of them been available to an English- speaking readership. Oh, These Times (1772) is a satirical attack on many vices Catherine wished to root out from her society: religious hypocrisy, superstition and slander. The main character, Mrs. Pious, is a superficially religious old woman who resembles Moliere's Tartuffe. Catherine again sets her sights on superstition in The Siberian Shaman (1786), this time by satirizing shamanism as a deceitful profession which preys on the gullible. This play was part of a group of three plays usually known as Catherine's "anti-masonic" trilogy, written as a warning against the growing influence of the freemasons. In a comprehensive introduction, Lurana Donnels O'Malley relates the plays to Catherine's status and philosophy.
DIVFragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world’s most alluring cities—a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city’s pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past./divDIV /divDIVIn this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg’s residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city’s glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place./div
Edward Braun's acclaimed work on Meyerhold available for the first time in paperback Vsevolod Meyerhold began his career in theatre as an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre, and after a spell in the remote provinces, he returned to Moscow at Stanislavski's invitation and founded a new, experimental studio for the Art Theatre. This book takes us through Meyerhold's extraordinary life of experiment and discovery, describing his rehearsal techniques and exercises and provides an acute assessment of his continuing influence on contemporary theatre.
From Russia comes this ironic, satirical, multi-layered, modern pop-art parable by Vassily Aksyonov. Your Murderer is a richly grotesque hodgepodge of different linguistic levels that defies all rules and mixes a powerful cocktail out of traditional slogans, invented obscentities, foreign words and phrases, terminology from sports and heavy drinking, and pure nonsense. Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theater and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. He is the Editor of Slavic and East European Performance and of harwood academic publishers's Polish and East European Theater Archive series. Your Murderer comes from Russia and is an ironic, satirical, multi-layered, modern pop-art parable - richly grotesque and on different linguistic levels. that defies all rules, mixing a powerful cocktail out of traditional slogans, invented obscentities, foreign words and phrases, terminology from sports and heavy drinking, and pure nonsense.
Balanchine and the Lost Muse is a dual biography of the early lives of two key figures in Russian ballet, in the crucial time surrounding the Russian revolution: famed choreographer George Balanchine and his close childhood friend, ballerina Liidia Ivanova.
These four Russian comedies were written during the reign of Nicholas I, a period of considerable repression and censorship. They represent the most popular genres of the period. Lensky's Her First Night was an immensely popular vaudeville which held the stage for years; Kozma Prutkov's Fantasy is a parody of vaudeville which was banned after one night. Turgenev's Luncheon with the Marshal is a comedy of manners about provincial life, and Saltykov-Schedrin's Pazukhin's Death is a satire of greed and corruption so savage that it was forbidden during the author's lifetime. This collection constitutes a remarkable comic spectrum which will assist in enlarging the English language repertoire with a set of newly available and hightly stageworthy scripts.
First Published in 1996. Translated from Chekhov's short plays and adapted from his stories by Vera Gottlieb, this collection consists of four one-act plays. Short though they are, each contains a whole range of dramatic possibilities and presented together the plays form a coherent programme, offering performers and audiences an intimate theatrical experience ranging from high comedy to sombre analysis. Both student and professional actors will find an opportunity to display all their powers of invention, characterisation, timing, audience control, concentration and finesse. A Chekhov Quartet has been performed in London, Moscow and at the 1990 Chekhov Festival in Yalta