Stage Russia HD presents Children of the Sun
Production: Red Torch Theatre
Language: Russian
Translation: English subtitles
Running time: 2h 35m
(Includes one 15 minute intermission)
Followed by Q&A with a Russian theatre expert Maria Shevtsova.
Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky's brilliant darkly comic "Children of the Sun" depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but like able, as they flounder, philosophize, and yearn for meaning, all while being totally blind to their impending annihilation. Multi-award-winning director Timofey Kulyabin's (Three Sisters, Onegin) modernized production, set in 1999 at Stanford University, focuses on the interplay between the characters, the relationships formed and broken, sparring over culture and the cosmos, barely sensing that their own privileged world is in jeopardy. Directed for the screen by Kulyabin and filmed from his Red Torch Theatre in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Timofey Kulyabin is one of the most prominent young directors in Russia today. At 34, he has already staged nearly two dozen productions across the Russian Federation as well as internationally in, among many, France, Austria, Romania, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. In 2016, he was commissioned by Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre to stage Donizetti's opera "Don Pasquale" and in 2019 returned to the great theatre, offering up a new staging there of Dvořák's opera "Rusalka". Kulyabin's other work for Stage Russia includes a 2017 presented sign-language version of Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" and a 2018 Golden Mask Award-winning staging of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin".
Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths University of London. Her books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Fifty Key Theatre Directors (2005, co-ed), Robert Wilson (2007; updated and extended second edition, 2019), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (2009, co-authored), Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009), which assembles three decades of her pioneering work in the field, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013, co-authored) andRediscovering Stanislavsky (forthcoming November 2019. Her books and articles have been translated into thirteen languages – Dodin and the Maly and Robert Wilson into Russian in 2014 and 2016. Shevtsova is an invited theatre critic, lecturer and interviewer in various languages at prominent universities and other institutions, and theatre festivals, notably the Golden Mask National Theatre Award and Festival in Moscow and Territories at Moscow’s Theatre of Nations. She is co-editor of the internationally renowned journal New Theatre Quarterly. Since 2011, she has been an elected member of the Academia Europaea.
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