Buenos Aires, Argentina
LOS HIJOS SE HAN DORMIDO
The children have gone to sleep
after The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
©Ligne Directe,2010
After The Three Sisters (or Un hombre que se ahoga / A man who drowns himself) in 2005 et Uncle Vanya (or Espía a una mujer que se mata / Spying on a woman killing herself) in 2006, Daniel Veronese turned to The Seagull for the third of his variations on Chekhov: The children have gone to sleep. This title, just as enigmatic as the previous ones, arouses a certain anxiety. The fear of the worst. Perhaps not all of them will wake up from this sleep?
In a unique stage set, Daniel Veronese brings together once more his ten virtuoso actors, most of them faithful regulars in his productions in the Buenos Aires independent theatre circuit. He constructs a "choir" version of The Seagull, in which everyone is running after someone else who is running after someone else, and so on. "That's where the Argentinians are like the Russians... We all want something that we don't have," says Veronese. The ups and downs and the the failed rendez-vous segue into one another as in a TV series.
But here there is no screen coming between the audience and the actors. Just the opposite: with Veronese, everything works towards an identification of the former with the latter.
He modernises Chekhov and adapts him to the rhythm of the contemporary period; he condenses the time of performance, gathers the characters together in the same space, to better reveal their own loneliness. Their comings and goings thus take on the look of an explosive conflagration from which none will escape unharmed.
Text taken from the programme notes of the Festival d'Automne, Paris, 2011
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