Uncle Vanya

“What I like about Chekhov is his modesty. He said, for example, that he ‘paints life as it is, and not a step more.’” That was how Vito Taufer opened his short essay about the play Platonov, which he directed years ago at the SNT Drama Ljubljana. And Chekhov himself had no grandiose ideas about life. In a letter to his wife Olga Knipper, he wrote: “You’re asking me about life. It’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, you don’t need to know anything else.”

Chekhov and Taufer meet again, in this season of the Mladinsko, this time joined by Uncle Vanya. This is a play in which a retired professor visits his country estate with his wife, stays there for a while, then leaves. Has anything happened? Everything seems exactly as it was before the play started. But in between, propelled by longing, passion, love, frustration, disappointment … worlds turned inside out. A stage study about the futility of lifelong ambitions, the (non)sense and desperation will be, as is Taufer’s intent, transposed to our contemporary time. Which will make the play even more direct. A carrot that grows in our garden.