Documentation > Archives past Seasons > The Past Seasons > Season 2007- 2008

Somewhere in an interior, and somewhere in the Europe of the 1960's or 70's, someone is hanging around a transistor that is on, and he more or less plans on organizing a party in order to kill time, and because he can't do any better, drowns his despair in a torrent of alcohol and words... Ivanov, is the first of Chekhov's plays to have been performed. As a young playwright, he was so ignorant of what would become a « Chekhovian » atmosphere, that he actually thought, in good faith, that he had written a comedy ! This detail though, did not escape Tamas Ascher, who has been familiar with Chekhov's work for over twenty years : the audience laughs often and wholeheartedly throughout this performance of a totally caustic Ivanov, where the opening and closing of doors beat out the rhythm of a sort of vaudeville play... The terrific Budapest theater troupe, Katona, makes each of the characters transcend their clichés ; embodied as such, according to Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, they « appear so much more vulnerable, closer to us than ever before."