For the first time Yuri Pogrebnichko staged “The Three Sisters” at the Taganka Theatre back in the early eighties. His co-author designer Yuri Kononenko boarded the stage with rusty metal plates and set it with metal beds. One had the impression that the action of the play is set in a barrack with convicts who were trying on the roles of Chekhov’s characters (later Yuri Lyubimov subjected this production to major editing and turned out his own version). In the early nineties Pogrebnichko revived this production with his OKOLO (Near Stanislavsky house).
At the moment he is putting on yet another version of the play with his graduate students at the Shchukin School who are helped by a group of the company’s ‘old timers’. The brilliant acting skills of Pogrebnichko’s ex-students are the best proof to the effect that his directorial style has nothing to do with the games of the marginal artists tending to turn any play into a nostalgic Soviet-styled parody show, but constitutes a mature method demanding the actors to demonstrate the best of their professional skills
Alla Shenderova, Infox.ru
And now they have come back. They are the same and yet not quite the same. It is already the second season when Pogebnichko is inviting his young students at the Shchukin Drama High School to perform in his new and renewed productions. These young people are talented and attentive. They seem to have had no problems with mastering the inimitable style of the OKOLO (Near Stanislavsky house). But it is precisely their young age and unconcealed self-confidence and faith in their future that have completely changed the accents of the productions and, maybe more importantly, the accents placed by Pogrebnichko himself. Now the three princesses in their touching laced birthday dresses appear among the roughly painted wooden planks, telegraph posts and all too familiar characters in Soviet military overcoats. Now it is no them who take care about everyone and all but just the other way around. They are being cared for and loved like daughters. And they seem to be admiring themselves. When the previous sisters declaimed in the final scene: “Must we live? Shall we live?” it sounded like a sentence without the right of appeal. Now the serene eyes of the three beauties are not dimmed. The fire has spared the home of these Prozorov sisters. Nothing horrible has happened to them yet.
Elena Grueva, «Time Out»
