The People of not Our Time

Vyacheslav Dolgachev, the artistic director of The New Drama Theatre, staged one of the late plays of Rozov, “From the Evening till the Afternoon”. The playwright didn’t betray his favorite subject, the story of a family, but his conclusions are more moderate, as if he afforded his characters to make difficult decisions for themselves. In the New Drama version this is definitely a Moscow story.

The director definitely wanted to lead everyone away from the standard notion of “play” – here we have no forced intonations, no trained voices, no expressive postures and gestures, neither declared conclusions or estimations. The people just live here, they wear their jackets and slippers, they set out the table and go to beds… The most ordinary moments, when the life can turn away from the well trodden path in the Chekhov’s way, and a person may re-evaluate all their life.

Here they will talk a lot about this, about the home and the family. Without obsessive intonations and preachments, but in a very simple and sincere manner. The people on the stage are not heroes, thoroughly made by the playwright. They are even losers of a kind. They are like us, but a little bit different, with some outdated notions about life and love, that, unfortunately, are lost by many of us. All the more so they are interesting; you may argue with them, you may take pity on them, but you also may envy them.