I was left deeply affected by Anna Viller’s portrayal of Anna Sergeyevna. The balmy Black Sea coast was established through dreamy meandering piano music in conjunction with silent films of Yalta from the early 20 th century projected onto the back wall.
The keen sense of time and place was also notable. The decision to intersperse the dialogue with actors narrating the plot from a more detached standpoint was an inspired one, as it not only enabled the actors to really revel in the glorious prose of the original short story, but also served to highlight the disparity between their inner and outer lives. Union Theatre certainly struck me as the ideal space for this performance, as the modest size of the auditorium enabled the performers to establish an easy rapport with the audience. Both assume they will never see one another again once they return home, but of course matters of the heart are rarely ever that simple. When Anna catches Dmitri’s attention he resolves to seduce her, hoping to enjoy a brief summer fling before returning to his humdrum family life in Moscow. Both are unhappily married and holidaying in Yalta alone without their spouses. The double bill opens with ‘The Lady with the Dog,’ which begins in the sleepy seaside resort of Yalta, where we meet Dmitri Gurov (James Viller) and Anna Sergeyevna (Anna Viller), the eponymous ‘lady with the dog.’ Dmitri is a self-assured yet dissatisfied man in his late thirties from Moscow, while Anna is a high-strung young woman from a provincial town who is never without her white Pomeranian dog. For this reason, I was intrigued to see Dmitrij Turchaninov’s imagining of ‘The Lady with the Dog’ and ‘The Bear.’ Each vivid story with its array of mercurial characters, whose inner lives so often conflicted with the suffocating tedium of the world around them, felt both strange and yet startlingly familiar to me. While I must admit that much of their subtle brilliance was lost on my limited adolescent consciousness, there was nevertheless something in them that I connected with.
I have always had a personal fascination with Anton Chekhov’s works, having first sought them out as a teenager. A striking, elegant adaptation of two of Chekhov’s most iconic works the psychological insight in these plays will leave you reeling.
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