Stage Russia HD (Satirikon Theatre): Anton Chekhov’s first of four major plays dramatizes the romantic and artistic conflicts between its four main characters:
Boris Trigorin, a well-known writer, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the would-be playwright Konstantin Tréplev.

Yury Butusov 's frenetic production abounds in an incredible freedom and openness, delving deep into the throes of artistic creation and the anguish of the artist who struggles to find a language of his own. This is not only a performance about the theatre, it is an anthology of the theatre that devours its children like monsters. With the shuffling of actors' roles, you begin to sense something of a quadraphonic portrait of the creative personality, which demonstrates that greatness is precariously close to mediocrity while suggesting that the opposite is also true. Chekhov's characters are in the process of creating their lives or watching them fall apart, which, according to Butusov, may be a closely related activity.

230 minutes (with one 15 minute intermission included)

In Russian with English Subtitles. Q&A with the director Yury Butusov, conducted by Dr Duška Radosavljević. Q&A in Russian with interpreter.

Yury Nikolaevich Butusov was born in Gatchina (town near St.Petersburg) 24 September, 1961.

Since February 2011 Butusov is the director of The Lensovet Academic Theatre in Saint-Petersburg.

Butusov has tried himself in a number of professions and spheres, including shipbuilding industry and horse riding.

In 1996 Yury Butusov graduated from the directing department of The Saint Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy (Irina Malochevskaya’s course) and the same year worked on the invitation of Vladislav Pazi as a director of The Lensovet Academic Theatre..

Butusov has gained his first fame for the earliest works including Nikolay Gogol’s Marriage (1995), Paradoxographer based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s  Notes From Underground (1996). His graduation work Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett), staged in The Krukovsky Canal Theatre in 1996, celebrated a great success. It received the first prize for the director’s work on the St.Petersburg’s festival The Christmas Parade and was proclaimed as “the event of the year”.

Yury Butusov taught at The Saint Petersburg State Theatre of Arts and The Russian University of Theatre Arts and staged Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at The Vakhtangov Theatre (2010).

Dr Duška Radosavljević is a dramaturg and academic based at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She has previously interviewed Yury Butusov for her collection The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013) and written about his Richard III at the Moscow Satirikon in her book Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21stCentury (Palgrave 2013). She is a regular contributor to The Stage, Exeunt and The Theatre Times.