Chekhov is requested but no new piece of him and rightly so. However, there are people who can write in French, Marc Dugain, for example, who is also director. He adapted a banal story of a translation after a bit outdated in the new Chekhov, Скучная история, one of the best prose writer.
We salute the courage of the adapter, as if Chekhov had felt the potential scenic his story, he would surely have written the piece himself. Fate has decreed otherwise.
Exhibit Marc Dugain lasts an hour and a half. The main role of the professor of medicine back to a remarkable actor, Jean-Pierre Darroussin.
The show begins with the full panoply of kitsch Chekhovian: Professor Nikolai Stepanovich - Napoleonic growling kind dear to the French - who has not long to live, his wife, Gabrielle Forest, which saw him gently and respectfully back, because it is important to arrange the future of their daughter, who wants to marry a young man a little suspicious, but nice. God thank you - there's chili and a motor the subject, a young and lovely Katia, Alice Carel, daughter of a deceased friend of the professor and under the tutelage of the latter, which, one suspects, would be a second wife if the first found all disappeared. It remains to Katia - actress missed but lucid - the role of rival nice ... It is normal, in fact, Paris is an adaptation softer than the new Russia.
The action of the play holds thanks to the expertise of Daroussin at its generous capacity to offset the trade that is sometimes lacking, to his colleagues. Fortunately, we can see some success, particularly in the staging modest and economical, very thoughtful, almost Shakespearean in style or in the final snub when Nikolai Stepanovich, who delivered a farewell to the world full of resentment, lies down, dying on a hotel bed and instead of dying , starts snoring loudly ...! Marc Dugain will let us leave rather amused that plagued by metaphysical reflections. A find, of course, though it would have been more appropriate if the piece evoked the work of the National Assembly and not the life of Russian society at the turn of the 19th century, on the eve of the Bolshevik coup. With
, too, and Adrien Michel Bompoil Bretet.
