Mikhail Chekhov Riga Russian Theatre

Eugeny Grishkovets

Winter

Tragically Comical Occasion

Opening - 25.03.2011.

Duration - 1 h 30 min

Creative team:

Director
Inese Pudzha

Set Designer
Arthur Arnis

Costumes Designer
Eliza Ceske

Choreographer
Dace Jonele

"A beautiful fairy-tale-like winter forest, the stars are shining in the sky. Snegurochka is walking through the fairy-taly forest,"- that is how this play begins. The author is Eugeny Grishkovets - playwright, actor and director, winner of many prestigious prizes

This nostalgic, reflective, empathic play promises a sensual experience of communion. Two people are freezing in a winter forest, they are waiting, reminiscing - and get the second chance in life. Or are they imagining this?

Eugeny Grishkovets writes about the things every person once have experienced - and that’s why everyone recognizes themselves in his texts. And whether the story is merry or sad one largely depends on our own memories.

The secret of Grishkovets’s plays is that he makes you almost physically feel every, even the less visible, moment of the real and fast-flowing life. Thus, you get to know your own sensations, emotions, feelings, associated with different situations. The atmosphere and image of the performance is created by brief minimalist set design (Arturs Arnis), costumes (Eliza Ceske) and light (Lauris Johansons).

Morozova N.
Grishkovets’s Play Staged in Riga Russian Theatre // Telegraf

There are no decorations on the stage. The whole area is strewn with the most common sand, which can be found in children’s sandboxes. On the one hand, the sand associatively performs the function of snow, on the other hand – symbolizes the instability of our world, the lack of solid surface under the foot.

„Winter”//

The death topic in the play is very important and emotionally significant for me. For both, as a person and a director, it was important for me to deliver the idea that death is always with us. We feel something, but do not know that it is. It always exists near life. Others bring the army topic in the foreground of this play, but I felt the topic of death very emotionally and sensitively.

I. Pudza in N. Lebedeva’s article “Winter and Life” // Vesti Segodnya

Amazingly harmonious and mutually complementary dramatics. I got interested, how a 26-year-old Latvian girl is able to understand and embody things so obscure to her - old symbols of Russian and Soviet past life, army jokes and Slavic archetypes in general.

Lebedeva N. Winter and Life// Vesti Segodnya