SUPERAMAS // 15 Juni 2018 // CHEKHOV FAST & FURIOUS
An empty seat next to me last night at FAST & FURIOUS made me think: If Chekhov’s character Uncle Vanya sat there and watched FAST & FURIOUS as part of the audience, would he have stayed until the end of the play?
It seemed that Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya had left the play at the very beginning. The blank space was filled by pop music, dance and performance by a wild youth which was trying to make as much noise as possible so as not to hear the cries of the joyless Uncle Vanya – an aspect that echoed their own inner sadness.
As FAST & FURIOUS makes clear, chaotic communication is nowadays the gun that shoots on all sides, ending up in a war of words and complete collapse of communication.
It is not only the communication that fill the gun which would have surely killed Uncle Vanya if he was sitting there with us but also the contrast, or what the characters rather ironically labeled “discrepancy” between their and Uncle Vanya’s time. While the gap between the new generation and Chekhov’s characters gets bigger and bigger, the spectator is left between them to reflect on the persistent sense of emptiness that runs through the whole play like a thread. What bridges Chekhov’s play and FAST & FURIOUS is the sense of ‚wasted‘ time and loss expressed by radically different pace and mediums.
By the end of the play, I realised that Uncle Vanya might have left the seat but not the theater – even though the means have changed completely, the emotions have remained the same. Indeed, finding a way to share that theater space between old and new is the greatest challenge of the play but it’s also what makes it a brilliant spectacle.
Regie, Bühne, Ton, Video Superamas
Kostüm Sabine Desbonnets mit dem 2. Semester des Kollegs der Modeschule Michelbeuern HLMW9 Wien (Monika Hartl, Hlazun Yuliya, Kmak Patrycja, Kuratova-Roither Maria, Ismael Maryam, Hofbauer Johanna, Katrin Hupf), Superamas
Lichtdesign Henri-Emmanuel Doublier
Von und mit Yuria Knoll, Peter Alexander Kopciak, Richi Kuong, Johanna Mettnitzer, Naemi Latzer, Miriam Rosenegger, Gudrun Schmidinger, Katharina Senzenberger, Joseph Cyril Stoisits, Maya Unger, Maria Winkler, Lin Wolf, weiteren jungen Erwachsenen aus Amiens, Reykjavik, Maubeuge und Superamas