BENGALURU: Often regarded as one of the greatest masters of the short-story form, Anton Chekhov’s works explored a wide range of themes, including the complexities of the human experience, relationships, and the role of the class system among others. A new Kannada play to be held at Ranga Shankara on May 2 adapts some of Chekhov’s highly-acclaimed short stories.
Presented in an anthology format and narrated by a character playing Chekhov himself, Chekhov to Champagne aims to highlight the eternal themes and motifs that the Russian writer explored throughout his career. Based on a script by writer Hema Pattanashetty, the play is produced by a city-based theatre troupe
Bengaluru Theatre Ensemble. “There are four stories in the play.
The first story explores the complexities of a marital relationship. The second story is about a woman struggling to save her family and the extreme lengths she goes to achieve that. The third explores the insecurities of a shy engineer who believes that he’s not being recognised for his work. The final story is about this worker who’s very intimidated by his superior and an unfortunate incident leads him to believe that he might get fired,” says Abhimany Bhupati, the director of the play and one of the founding member of the troupe. “All these stories, even though written almost a century ago, are still very relevant in today’s times,” says Bhupati.
A prominent figure in the realism movement, Chekov’s works are notable for their insightful and nuanced themes. Having emerged as a reaction to the romanticised and idealised depictions of the world found in literature at the time, the realism movement sought to portray the world in its actual form – flaws and imperfections included. Chekhov, with his obsessive focus on everyday life, embraced realism and depicted the struggles and hardships faced by the ordinary people of Russia.
That focus on realism is what drew Bhupati and his group to Chekhov’s works. “We hadn’t really explored realism until this play. All our previous productions explored idealistic and philosophical themes. And when we started to look at realism, we were instantly drawn to Chekhov’s works. When we found out that there was a Kannada translation of his short stories, we decided it was an ideal source material for our production,” Bhupati shares.
Meanwhile, Bhupati believes that the continued relevance of the short stories, combined with Chekhov’s humorous and satirical writing style will mean that the audience will be able to relate to most of the
characters in the play.