Based on Edmond Rostand's play The Romantics. Volgograd Young Spectator's Theatre
On October 15, 2008, the Volgograd Young Spectator's Theatre premiered The Romantics by Edmond Rostand.
Director — Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Albert Avkhodeev
Set design — Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation Elena Orlova
Costume designer — Lyudmila Terekhova
…Elena Orlova's scenography expresses the central idea of the play with remarkable precision: only that which is won through overcoming obstacles is truly solid. Glass reigns here — a transparent, fragile material from which the wall separating the two families is built. Later it becomes a screen. Later still — a deaf trap that swallows sound: speak or do not speak, it is impossible to be heard… The movable transparent wall becomes a capacious image of this extremely subtle production, where nothing appears to be what it really is. The wall is not really a wall, the feud is not really a feud, and love, in fact, is not yet love — at least for a time. Intoxicated by gallant fairy tales, the young people build their lives on glass, in glass, under glass — like in an aquarium, where the poor fish do not even realize that they are on display and that anyone may thrust in a paw and pull them out into the air…
Tatyana Kuzmina
Strastnoy Boulevard, 10 (Russian Theatre: information, problems, trends). Issue No. 1-121/2009
ON “HEAVENLY DREAMS”
Yesterday the Volgograd Young Spectator's Theatre opened its new season with a classical comedy by the late nineteenth-century French playwright Edmond Rostand, The Romantics. Among the merits of this comedy is the very contemporary-sounding irony with which the author treats the young heroes' dreams of uniting their lives only in a romantic manner: they dream of duels, abductions, sword fights and other attributes of bookish romance. Their fathers, eager to hasten the wedding, stage a “terrifying” performance for the lovers with the help of hired actors. But the children soon learn that they have been “puppets in the hands of laughing fathers.” This is where the real test of their love begins…
The premiere audience at the Young Spectator's Theatre fully trusted its feelings and expressed stormy applause to the creators of the production: director Albert Avkhodeev, set designer Elena Orlova, costume designer Lyudmila Terekhova, lighting designer Leonid Korsakov, stage-fight director Vladimir Pivovarov, choreographer Tatyana Aksyonova, and actors Tatyana Doronina and Evgeny Zhdanov, Andrey Seliverstov and Oleg Shulepov, Timur Abdulfayzov and Boris Kudryavtsev.
THE WEEKLY RUSSIAN NEWSPAPER INTER
THE RUSTLE OF LIGHT DRESSES… On October 15 the Volgograd Young Spectator's Theatre opens its 39th theatre season
…the creative company approached the opening of the new season with a store of varied impressions and, most importantly, with a premiere already prepared. This time they chose a classical comedy — an early play by the French poet and dramatist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Edmond Rostand, The Romantics, which brought him his first real recognition and the prize of the French Academy. (The summit of his work was the heroic drama Cyrano de Bergerac.)
The very title carries an age-related impulse, since romanticism as an elevated way of thinking and feeling belongs most of all to the very young. The main characters are seventeen, and they are in love… The director of the production, Albert Avkhodeev, tried to preserve precisely the meaning and nerve of the comedy, poetically expressed by the author in the play's finale:
“The rustle of light dresses, the charm of a light rhyme,
Bitter little moments
like a passing cloud,
A light smile
of kindly jest,
The magic moonlight,
the bright light of the sun!..”
Rostand pointed to a special lightness in the staging even in his very first stage direction: “The action takes place anywhere, so long as the costumes are beautiful.” They will indeed be beautiful, have no doubt, since they were devised by Lyudmila Terekhova, who has long proved her ability to create festive theatricality on stage. In the same key, artist Elena Orlova, Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation, has conceived the stage space itself, which transforms easily thanks to movable openwork constructions. We hope the audience will also enjoy the actors' plastic expressiveness and their skill in stage fencing, prepared by Vladimir Pivovarov, a professional stunt specialist invited from Moscow and professor at RATI (GITIS), in collaboration with Volgograd choreographer Tatyana Aksyonova.
The Romantics was rehearsed with two casts, one of which consists of graduating students of VGIIK and will be regarded as their diploma work. Among the theatre's actors involved are Evgeny Zhdanov and Tatyana Doronina, Andrey Seliverstov and Oleg Shulepov, Timur Abdulfayzov, Boris Kudryavtsev and others…
Galina BESPALTSEVA,
Volgogradskaya Pravda, October 8, 2008
