The Lithuanian-American director Yana Ross staged the Polish premiere of a play by the eminent Russian playwright and screenwriter Mikhail Durnenkov. The action unfolds in a suburban dacha by a lake, where a group of close friends and acquaintances meet for a weekend getaway. A pervasive sense of dread, trauma, and imminent danger looms over the social gathering. In his play, Durnenkov invokes the classic dramas of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, while making a nod to today’s crisis in Europe and the threat of war. The play originated as a commission of Moscow’s Gogol Center, where it was staged in 2015. The premiere at TR Warszawa is its first staging outside of Russia.
Ross says: “The Lake is clearly in dialogue with Chekhov's oeuvre. People eat, drink and talk over a weekend on the lake, seemingly nothing happens but you feel the world is spiraling into an abyss at a supersonic speed. Our morals and ethics are tested. Hypocrisy and complacency, pseudo-intellectual superiority and fear of the muscle in the lower classes.
On the surface three couples battle daily issues of betrayal, child rearing and soul searching. Underneath the murky waters of their psyche lie enormous breach of ethics, guilt and fear of a neighboring war.”
