MEDIATHEK

Uncle Vanya – A collection of people has met in a house in the Russian countryside. Professor Serebryakov has finished his work and is returning back to the countryside from the city. All his life he has devoted himself to art, realism. And Vanya has worked all his life for Serebryakov. He has sacrificed himself. Now there is time to take everything apart, understand everything, time to be together again finally. Everyone is suffering, and everyone is desperately looking for his or her truth. And yet even truth is losing credibility. Any sort of certainty is trickling away. Everything is cloaked in cynicism. Is it still possible to understand one’s life? Is there still any sense in sacrificing oneself for someone? How should one live with ones’ truths and also with other people? How can one carry on living – and on, and on? HaDivadlo last performed Chekhov eight years ago – Three Sisters, directed by Sergei Fedotov. A dramaturgical exception, it broke a run of productions of almost exclusively modern works. The theatre’s dramaturgy is now becoming less focused – the new management is maybe looking for a direction in which to head. The young team does not approach the text in an iconoclastic way, but with respect highlights the subject of burning individualism. Uncle Vanya is shown here almost without cuts, with devotion and discipline, with only the outer part wrapped in the present day. With distinctive support from several of the acting performances, a pulsing production has been created that shows – once again – the greatness of Chekhov’s text.



// Credits //

Direction Ivan Buraj
Translation Leoš Suchařípa
Dramaturgy Dagmar Radová a Matěj Nytra
Set Jana Boháčková a Lenka Jabůrková
Music selection and adaptation Pavel V. Boiko
Directorial assistance Tereza Agelová

Cast:
Ivan Vojnickij / Jan Lepšík
Vojnická / Simona Peková
Serebrjakov / Cyril Drozda
Jelena / Lucie Schneiderová j. h.
Soňa / Táňa Malíková
Astrov / Robert Mikluš j. h.
Marina / Marie Ludvíková
Tělegin / Miroslav Kumhala

Premiere April 8th, 2016



// Press //

Engaging two actors from elsewhere was a felicitous move on Buraj’s part. Doctor Astrov is wonderfully played by Robert Mikluš, as a man comically beset by both middle age and some sort of fleeting feeling for Yelena. This female role is an interesting match for the other guest actor, Lucie Schneiderová, who is not just a bored professor’s wife, but brings to the stage something of the peculiar restlessness of a woman who genuinely does not know what and who she longs for. Another excellent female figure is Táňa Malíková’s Sonya. She precisely captures the double nature of the characters in the play who totter on the boundary between boredom and activity. Buraj’s production is not, in its resulting form, iconoclastic in any way, as we might expect from this theatre, but here this is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
Luboš Mareček, ČR Vltava

The timelessness of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the mental frameworks and visual environment of today.
Luboš Mareček, MFDnes



// Author //

Ivan Buraj (1988) – While a student at JAMU in Brno he worked on a placement in the National Theatre preparing Robert Wilson’s production of The Makropulos Affair. His graduation production, Heinrich von Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg, gained a special jury prize at the international festival of theatre schools, Istropolitana. The production was also nominated for Production of the Year in the Divadelní noviny awards. In the 2012/13 season he created the auteur production Creatures for the HaDivadlo studio, and contributed his production sketch about public space for the Divadlo Husa na provázku’s set design magazine, Rozrazil. In the 2013/14 season he worked with the Divadlo Letí on their project Against Progress, Against Love, Against Democracy, which appeared at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2014/15 he created the production Castle (the glow of integration) for Brno’s HaDivadlo, a rewriting of Kafka’s work. During this season the play Transfer!!!! Was also created in the National Theatre of Moravo-Silesia, about one of the many houses evacuated during the expulsion of the German population after the Second World War, and then reinhabited. Since 2015 he has been the artistic head of HaDivadlo, where he has shown Madame Bovary and Uncle Vanya.



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