Villa Dolorosa

Presented by Le Théâtre de l'épée de boisThree sisters, three birthdays, a villa that is crumbling away. By transposing Chekhov into our era, Rebekka Kricheldorf has created a work that is as funny as it is desperate.

In this bourgeois living room where time seems suspended, we discover beings who are cultivated to the point of paralysis, aware of their condition yet incapable of escaping it.

The spectator becomes an accomplice to these rituals where people talk without acting, where the desire for change collides with the secret attraction of immobility. When outside elements disrupt this fragile balance, the characters' ambivalence bursts into the open.

Cultured, Russophile parents have given their children, alongside a love of art, Chekhovian first names.

Irina, the eternal student who lounges around in pyjamas, is the middle sister, between Olga, a rational teacher, and Masha, the youngest, who escapes her lukewarm marriage daily by crossing the street to return to the family home, her sisters, and her brother Andrei, who never quite finishes perfecting his future book.

A project that is more than ever relegated to the background because he has fallen in love. The arrival of Janine, the girlfriend, while causing a series of discrepancies, brings a breath of fresh air and a definite sense of reality.

And then there is Georg, Andrei's friend, a regular visitor to this villa where he finds the air and fantasy denied to him by an existence bogged down between a suicidal wife and a career whose banality depresses him.

Year after year, nothing changes, birthdays are invariably ruined. The family grows, time flows, words resurface, like ailments, both trivial and metaphysical. For they talk, and a great deal, within the walls of Villa Dolorosa – represented in a sort of stripped-down opulence.

They tell each other everything, without filters and without taboos, among the members of the Freudenbach family (literally, stream of joy). Everything. With an exuberant and melancholic frankness, sometimes terribly ferocious. With surt