2019 / live stage production / 3 hours 25 min with one intermission / created and directed by Rimas Tuminas / country: Russia / language: Russian / subtitles: English
To read more, click me for Program Synopsis.
The play unfolds in the memory and imagination of Pushkin’s characters. The images are split between past and present, between reality and imagination.The scale of the production constantly shifts from noisy celebrations to secluded contemplation, from crowd scenes to lonely recollections, all of which are drawn together from the past just like the fragments of Tatyana’s love letter, framed and hung on the wall, looming next to and above Onegin’s arm-chair.
Filmed before a live audience from Moscow’s venerable Vakhtangov Theatre.
“Yet there are indelible wordless moments, too, many of them: a snowstorm swirling around a lantern-lit carriage, women in white suspended on silver swings, a veil that makes a mourner into a bride. Reflected in that mirrored wall, the images are dark, and we see how sublime, in art, suffering can be.” -Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times
“Pushkin is as great to the Russians as Shakespeare is to us. This production, too, is Shakespearean in its ambition, and in its ability to move. The high concept here was the age-old endeavour of great art, to unfurl a single story from the personal to the universal, to make Tatyana and Onegin’s love loss be about every broken heart that ever was, about every time we have done something we regret for a lifetime. Magnificent, devastating and quite brilliant.” -Serena Davies, The Telegraph
To see a preview of this production, click here. Spoilers ahoy.
LUMIERE CINEMA 