The play Russian Romance, written in Russian by the famous Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivaškevičius, is an important event bridging the cultures of the East and West. In 2017, the play received the top Russian theatre award, The Golden Mask, as the best work by a playwright staged that year in a Russian theatre (in Moscow’s Mayakovsky Theatre, directed by Mindaugas Karbauskis). The play is staged for the first time in Lithuania.
Ivaškevicius’s work tells a story of a desperate struggle waged in the family of the Russian classic Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) for several months beginning with the writer’s death. Koršunovas masterfully constructs a performance from the incredibly meaningful play by Ivaškevičius. At the request of the director, the playwright expanded one of the main roles – of Chertkov, who is also a real historical figure. This man is a friend of the writer’s family, who has earned full trust of Leo Tolstoy, became his ‘secret weapon man’, but also turned the writer’s family life into real hell during the latter’s sunset years. The main victim of this intrigue is the writer’s wife, Sofya Tolstaya.
Tolstoy himself is not is not part of the play or the performance. Nelė Savičenko, the winner of the National Prize, plays two roles here: both of the invisible writer, and of an incredibly strong woman tormented by passions and endless love – his wife. Whereas Anton Chekhov saw ‘three pounds of love’ in one of his plays, in Ivaškevičius’s play about Leo Tolstoy, there are as much as three hundred pounds of passionate, unyielding, inhuman, all-creating and all-destructive female love. All this weight falls on the shoulders of the character of Nelė Savičenko (including the actress herself), and she masterfully carries this burden.
Playwright Ivaškevičius and Oskaras Koršunovas, one of the most prominent directors of the Lithuanian theatre, noticed the features of female heroines from several Tolstoy’s works (first of all, Anna Karenina) in the character of the writer’s wife, and conveyed those features. “This performance will be a dramatic event,” said Koršunovas before the premiere. “While working here, I realised that the Russian drama theatre of Lithuania has a very strong acting company, capable of performing both complex stage tasks, and excellent ‘solo parts’. With this play, the same thing happened to me that usually happens with all the dramas of Ivaškevičius: you understand how good a play he has created only by putting it on the theatre stage. Such was the case with his Banishment; such is the case now. After all, modern drama is not only something that a playwright has created today. The real modern drama is one that is being created right now, gives momentum, dictates to the entire theatre the possibilities of a new stage language. This play by Ivaškevičius has this very property.”
Performed in Russian with Lithuanian subtitles
Photos by Laura Vansevičienė
