Villa Dolorosa

Presented by Le Théâtre de l'épée de bois

Three sisters, three birthdays, a crumbling villa. By transposing Chekhov into our own era, Rebekka Kricheldorf delivers a work that is as funny as it is desperate. In this bourgeois living room where time seems suspended, we discover beings cultivated to the point of paralysis, aware of their condition but incapable of escaping it. The spectator becomes complicit in these rituals where one speaks without acting, where desires for change clash with the secret allure of immobility. When external elements disturb this fragile balance, the characters' ambivalence bursts into the open. Cultured and Russophile parents have given their children, in addition to a taste for art, Chekhovian first names. Irina, the eternal student who lounges in her pyjamas, is the youngest, between Olga, a rational teacher, and Macha, the youngest, who daily escapes a lukewarm marriage by crossing the street to join the family home, her sisters, and her brother Andreï, who endlessly refines his future book. A project more than ever relegated to the background because he has fallen in love. The arrival of Janine, the girlfriend, while causing a series of shifts, brings a new breath of fresh air, a certain sense of reality. And then there is Georg, Andreï's friend, a regular visitor to this villa where he finds the air and fantasy that his existence, bogged down between a suicidal wife and a career whose banality depresses him, deprives him of. Year after year, nothing changes, birthdays are invariably spoiled. The family grows, time flows, words resurface, like ailments, both trivial and metaphysical. For there is much, much talk within the walls of Villa Dolorosa – depicted in a kind of stripped-down opulence. Everything is said, unfiltered and without taboo, among the members of the Freudenbach family (literally, 'stream of joy'). Everything. With an exuberant and melancholic frankness, a terrible ferocity at times. With above all