SHUKSHIN'S STORIES AT THE WIENER FESTWOCHEN

festwochen.at

Premiere in the German-speaking area

They fight, they booze, they love passionately: the people in Vasily Shukshin's stories are simple, direct, genuine. For Latvian director Alvis Hermanis, the characters created by the short-lived poet (1929-1974) are quite immediately "Russian". Just like Shukshin's films, they have been part of Hermanis' life ever since his childhood in Riga.

In 2008, Hermanis decided to delve deeper into the "new Russia" and suggested to the Theater of Nations to mount a stage production of ten of Shukshin's masterful narratives. For the Moscow actors familiar with the director's theatrical language, this choice was a very surprising one; the break with his past track record is intentional. In his atmospheric production, which will be shown by Wiener Festwochen for the first time outside of Russia, Hermanis accents the clash of two quite different worlds: on the one hand, a cast of outstanding young acting stars, all of them denizens of the emerging megalopolis that is Moscow; on the other hand, the poetic world of simple, provincial Russia.

At the center, there is Hermanis himself: his perspective is that of a foreigner, albeit a foreigner born at the same time in the same country: the Soviet Union. Together with photographer Monika Pormale, he embarked on a research trip to Shukshin's birthplace and workplace. In Srostki, a village situated in the Altai mountains near the border with Kazakhstan, the artist photographed people in the original locations of the tales and later transformed these pictures into large-format stage backdrops that endow the play with a mood hovering between reality and illusion.