Vanya in Krivina : Gloss

Uncle Vanya in Krivina: playing near two rivers

Peta Tait
View Theatre
Show Meta

Bagryana Popov’s imagined performance pushes her ongoing theatre project with Chekhov’s drama to the limits of where life and theatre converge. I loved her production of Uncle Vanya for such a convergence; I viewed the first iteration in Avoca. It was performed in a house that was as near as possible to a late nineteenth-century Russian house – a historic wooden two-storey house imported from Sweden and assembled on the banks of the Avoca river under gum trees. The production started in the front yard and, slowly over two days, we moved with the characters through the house and out into the back yard. In the breaks, environmentalists gave talks – Chekhov’s Astrov had multiplied. This was a long way from the contained theatre of a Chekhov play presented over a couple of hours and yet it was the same play. Instead, the audience was living with the characters in that house.

The idea of theatre as a lived reality has become part of our twenty-first century experience as the boundaries between reality and performance come unstuck, and theatre’s imaginative foyers are reconfigured. The widespread uncertainty – “this cannot be happening” – over actual news and its faked simulacra; the horror about politicians and others who tweet rather than think their random hateful thoughts; and inactivity as the changing climate threatens the homes of the global poor. But there is something unexpectedly reassuring about how Bagryana imagines her life as theatre, perhaps because of the surprising continuity that I have found in Bulgaria where the remnants of two 8,000 year-old-houses are preserved in Stara Zagora. A type of lived theatre that globally connects Australia to Russia and Bulgaria in the nostalgic idyll of the Krivina house of Bagryana’s childhood somehow seems vividly real.

 

About the Author
Peta Tait