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Ksenia Dragunskaya
The Apple Thief
Lyric comedy in two acts
Director - Tatiana Kazakova
Décor – Stefania Graurogkaite
Lighting designer - Eugene Ganzburg
Unusual works by the young Moscow playwright Ksenia Dragunskaya are not at all like other contemporary plays: there are no stereotyped characters and situations, deliberately intricate storyline or lightness and plainness of thought. Ironic and derisive, they remind a personal diary, which reflect the author’s observations on flying lifetime.
The specialists refer Dragunskaya’s stories to “lyrical avant-gardism”, and ascribe lightness and imaginary of her style, mild humour to her genetic memory – Ksenia’s father, Viktor Dragunsky, is the author of the well-known “Deniska’s stories”. Dragunskaya Jr writes for children too. She writes miraculous tales about the boys, who are all fools, about the Great Father and adventures of New Year Snow. As to her adult fairy-tales, they are all about love.
It is love that tied characters of “The Apple Thief”. Its birth belongs to the students’ past, songs by the fire, first kisses in the wind. Today’s love, that is hard to find, belongs to the vanity of a huge and beautiful city where people may live close by, walk along the same streets and not see each other for years, and when suddenly running into each other, they may not want to or fail to see the main, and may lose forever what is the most important in their lives.
According to the main character, the performance is “about love, sorrow, and hope” – about hope to find that special someone, whom you may follow to the ends of the earth and tell about everything that has happened to you during these years of loneliness. Though, not only about that. It’s also about the irony of fate – about the stupid autumn tradition to filch apples, and about the possibility to escape a gangster’s bullet but run up on a shot of a lonely watchman in the apple orchard. It tells us about life of urban snow, about its indispensable secret coming and useless inevitable end. About its invariable annual recurrence in its novelty and stirring purity…
Cast: Sergey Russkin, Natalia Tkachenko, Nikolai Smirnov, Tatiana Polonskaya, Adrei Averkov, and Nikita Ivanov.
Running time – 2 hours 10 min. |
