A Play Without a Title

Last year the theatre celebrated its 50th anniversary: it was founded in 1947, and has always remained faithful to the classical drama repertory, with Alexander Ostrovsky being the company's favorite playwright. Since 1997, its Artistic Director has been Nikolai Petrov. Among the most recent productions of the Kaliningrad Drama Theatre are Treachery and Love by Schiller, The Ship of Fools by N.Kolyada, the musical My Fair Lady after Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, Ostrovsky's The Wolves and the Sheep and The Royal Games at Elsinor by N Jordanov. The company occasionally invites collaboration from directors from other theatres. A case in point is Yevgeny Marcelli, whose production of A Play without a Title (after Chekhov's Fatherlessness) is representing the Kaliningrad Drama at this festival.

Yevgeny Marcelli is one of the most interesting directors of today's Russian provincial stage. He began his career as an actor at the Young Spectators' Theatre in Bryansk and then took a degree course in theatre direction at the Shchukin Drama School in Moscow. For the past ten years he has been Artistic Director of the theatre at Sovetsk, a small town in the Kaliningrad region. At the beginning of the 1990s, Marcelli produced a number of sketch-like 'improvisation perfor­mances', based on the idea of a game, or make-belief, as a key theatrical principle. Marcelli's theatre is defiantly apolitical and asocial; the message it communicates to the audience is about the eternal round of life and its mysteries. It is a message born of silence and sounds, of glances and touches.