12 Stories of Love (16+)

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As a rule, all theatrical actors sooner or later meet Chekhov on their way. The New Drama Theatre was approaching him for more than 30 years. Vyacheslav Dolgachev usually starts to introduce the great playwright to the actors not with his plays but with his small stories, written by ‘Antosha Chekhonte’. Thus Dolgachev’s play «Fairy Tales of Melpomene» in Moscow Art Theatre was based on the stories from the Chekhov’s first collection of his short stories with the same name (1884).

12 Stories of Love (12 Novellas About Love) are connected first of all with the period of «Motley Stories» (1886). And although all the stories are familiar — «An Upheaval», «The Slime», «The Expensive Dog», «Polinka», «The Lodger» etc. — each time their reveal a new profound meaning.

This wonderful stories, full of bitterness and humour, being worldly vivid sketches, were called «novellas» for their laconicism and brief action. Since they reflected the heated conflicts and had artistic dialogues they were also called «small plays». In these dramatic novellas it is possible to find the typical characters of his future great plays: «The Seagull», «Uncle Vanya», «Three Sisters», «The Cherry Orchard» and others.

The people of the «motley stories» are the same painfully familiar characters that inhabit our modern life. Isn’t it the reason why the Chekhov’s humouristic novellas, performed at the stage, always bring pleasure to the audience?
«In our play we tried to show these texts as if they would have been written today by an author who knows us very well, — says Vyacheslav Dolgachev. — We make a kind of surgical dissection of Chekhov’s characters in order to find what had changed inside us for the last hundred years.»

The play was an award winner of the VII International Theatre Festival «In the Homeland of Chekhov» in Taganrog (2010), and it was performed at the XI International Black Sea Theatre Festival in Trabzon, Turkey (2010), II International Theatre Festival «Theatre. Chekhov. Yalta» (2009), International Theatre Festival «Melpomene of Tauria» in Kherson (2009), International Theatre Festival «Melikhov’s Spring» (2009).

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