Monday, November 12, 2007

11/1 "Twelfth Night"...in Russian!

On Thursday night, Nancy, Chris and I went to see a performance of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" by the Chekhov International Theatre Festival. The production was directed by Declan Donnellan, a world renown actor and director of Shakespearean plays. If I read "Twelfth Night" in high school, it wasn't thoroughly since I didn't remember anything so Nancy gave us a quick synopsis. This became essential since the play was in Russian with a translation into Korean on projection screens placed on both sides of the stage. Since I don't speak Russian and am not fluent in Korean, it was pretty tricky to watch a comedy of errors involving twins, gender-bending and mistaken identities in this format. To make it extra challenging, it was performed by an all-male cast!

The play was excellent and though the only words I understood were "
spaseeba" and "dasvidanya", the Chekhov players were so expressive it didn't matter. And I was pleased that I could keep up somewhat with the translated dialogue.

1 comment:

Nooner said...

I think they also spoke French once...s'il vous plait maybe?
ha ha...still, great performance, wasn't it?