Dramatised and directed by Mark Zakharov Sets designed by Oleg Sheintsis Costumes designed by Maria Danilova Music by Sergei Rudnitsky General manager Sergei Nikitin Cast: Inna Churikova (Antonina Vasilievna) Alexander Abdulov (Alexei Ivanovich) Oleg Yankovsky, Armen Dzigarkhanian (General Zagoriansky) Leonid Bronevoi (Potapych) Alexandra Zakharova (Polina) Maria Mironova (M-lle Blanche) and others

Mark Zakharov was born in Moscow in 1933. He was trained as an actor at the State Institute of Theatrical Art, from which he graduated in 1955. He began his career as a director in 1956, with an amateur student company of Perm University. From there he moved on to Moscow, where he directed the productions of the Moscow University Student Theatre. In 1965 Zakharov was invited to the Satire Theatre, where he staged Alexander Ostrovsky's A Lucrative Position (1967), which brought him fame. Since 1973, Zakharov has been Artistic Director of the Lenkom Theatre, and with his arrival the theatre immediately got on the way to becoming one of the most popular theatres in the country, which it has now been for considerable time. Mark Zakharov has published many articles on drama, politics and wrote a well-known book on artistic directing, entitled Contacts at Different Levels.

There is a boisterous, carnival-like Lenkom, with a whirlpool of dance rhythms and a roar of music, with petards banging and thick smoke crawling down into the auditorium from the stage... There is a soft-spoken and delicate Lenkom, when you can hear raindrops outside, when the words on stage are uttered in half-whisper, and out of the entire scope of musical instruments and contemporary 'noise-making' devices only the live violin is allowed to play its tune... There is a 'star' Lenkom, when the reading of the programme itself, with reading out the actors' names is a treat in itself - as if you were present at the awards ceremony of some film festival... There is an 'unknown Lenkom, when you see a perfect ensemble of highly professional actors on stage, with many of them totally unfamiliar, and you try to guess which of them is still a student and which has been with the company for years... Grigory Gorin

Lenkom 27 March, 23, 24 April Malaya Dmitrovka, 6

Six Characters in Search of an Author | Festival Homepage | When the World Was Green

Write us: chekhov_fest@theatre.ru