A four-act show based on a reading of a play by Anton Chekhov. The play is entitled: Лeший. The play was written, performed and… failed, from the Latin quassare, to break. The play broke. The broken play was repudiated by the author. The author said of it: “may it never be published or performed again”. The author wrote it one hundred and thirty-six years ago. He wrote it with words, without images, cinema did not yet exist. But if, like us, you do not yet speak Russian, Лeший, is not a word, it is an image. And you, who do you see there? Who? Yes, who.
ABOUT THE PLAY
In Лeший (Leshi), ATRESBANDES delves into an unknown play by Chekhov —an early version of Uncle Vanya, which was translated as The Woods Wizard— to reconstruct its fragments and imagine what might have been. Based on the theater of objects and a visual and abstract language, the company proposes a stage reading in four acts, each with its own aesthetics and a different perspective on the text: from a universe of objects to an installation, a theatrical conference and a piece that is approached from the point of view of movement.
The result is a free and playful exploration of the Chekhovian world, where a single performer summons the multiple characters and emotions that inhabit the original work. Лeший (Leshi) plays with the limits of theatre and with the imaginaries that accompany it —like Leshi himself (a character from Scandinavian mythology), spirit of the forest, protective, contradictory and powerful— to bring to the stage the mystery of what was lost and that, perhaps, still looks at us.
New project by the company ATRESBANDES in collaboration with the Centre de les Arts Lliures of the Fundació Joan Brossa and IF Barcelona, an international festival of visual theatre, objects and puppets.