The train stopped: Danil Chashchin sent the "Karenina" on a feverish journey
Trying to kill "Anna Karenina" is always a risky business. Every educated viewer has his own Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, Kitty. The boldness of producer Leonid Roberman and director Danil Chashchin, who decided to transfer one of the greatest novels of world literature into a train carriage rushing into the unknown, looks all the more unexpected. "Karenina" is not a literal staging of Tolstoy, but an attempt to break the usual form, turning a psychological drama into a visual thriller with the aesthetics of a big blockbuster. What came of it is in the Izvestia article.
One-way ticket
The main concept of the play is uncompromising: all the action takes place inside the train. This is not just a metaphor: space becomes a trap. In Tolstoy, Anna is killed by the wheels of a train; in Chashchin, she finds herself locked inside him from the very beginning.
— The train was my idea. Together with the artist Maxim Obrezkov, we thought about where the action might take place, and then this image was born. Anna and Vronsky meet at the station. Karenina's life ends at the station. Actually, just like the life of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy," director Danil Chashchin explained to Izvestia.
The set design by Maxim Obrezkov, the main artist of the Vakhtangov Theater, turns the carriage into a living organism: cramped, vibrating, breathing with the characters. Ruslan Mayorov's light acts like a nervous system — bursts, stretching shadows, endless twilight in a cold blue spectrum. The performance is visually closer to a noir and psychological thriller than to a classical stage.
Working with space is impressive: the carriage shrinks to a box with nowhere to breathe, then expands to the size of Anna's inner space, then turns into a narrow tunnel with no exit. This is not a background, but a separate character — nervous, unpredictable, alien.
A corset for a secular society
Anna, played by Anastasia Ukolova (Angelina Strechina in the double), appears on stage already broken. The play opens with a scene of childbirth — Tolstoy's is the middle of the novel, but Chashchin immediately sets the temperature. There is no linear narrative here: the first scene is a diagnosis. The opium fever in which the heroine begins her journey.
For Ukolova, this is not a story about finding love, but about regaining a sense of her own vivacity. Her character doesn't run from the world—she tries to hear herself before it's too late.
Anton Filipenko (Dmitry Chebotarev in the double) creates the most modern Vronsky. This is not a liberating hero or a romantic hunter. This is a man who is frankly afraid of his own passion. He understands that the connection with Anna is not about love, but about destruction.
"The story of betrayal is fundamental," Filipenko says, comparing the novel to Othello and Crime and Punishment.
His Vronsky is energy without a holding center. It bursts into flames and consumes everything in its path. He doesn't save Anna—he only accelerates her spiral movement.
Vitaliy Kovalenko's Karenin is, in the artist's opinion, the most positive character in history. And it's played without caricature or moralizing. Sometimes the director turns him into an almost mystical figure, as if he were weaving an invisible cocoon around Anna. But in this interpretation, Karenin is not a bureaucrat or an icy husband, but a man desperately trying to hold on to a disintegrating sense of family.
— All the characters in this story are unhappy. And I would call the play "Karenin" rather than "Karenina". Because for me, this is the drama of a man who has been trying to follow the norms of society all his life. But our story is about the destruction of illusions and the acquisition of a very simple thing — the understanding of true life," said producer Leonid Roberman.
Victoria Sevryukova's costumes complement the overall idea. They're doing to Anna Karenina what 19th-century society did: they're squeezing. Corsets, tight lines, measured rigor — all this becomes a direct metaphor for suffocating morality. The moment when Alexey Karenin pulls Anna into a corset, squeezing her identity with tight cords of public opinion, is one of the most striking episodes of the play.
Sleep at a temperature of 39
This is not a retelling of Tolstoy or an illustration of a novel, but the dream of a man who reread Anna Karenina in a state of emotional fever. Hence the nervous rhythm, the abrupt changes of scenes, the feeling of continuous movement, as if the whole performance is one long breath before the crash.
The atmosphere is enhanced by thriller elements: a little girl with blonde curls appears on stage in an elegant dress. This is Anna, the one whom the heroine calls to another world, because in this she will not be able to be happy.
The duration of the performance is about an hour and a half, which, considering the volume of the novel, is almost an audacity. The story inevitably loses some depth, but the conciseness creates a shock effect: the viewer is not seated in the usual epic, he is placed on a train rushing without brakes.
The performance will inevitably cause controversy. Fans of Tolstoy's academic productions may see too much convention and too little social romance in it. Those who demand literal adherence to the text will also be unhappy: Chashchin deliberately refuses Tolstoy's details — light, balls, environment.
But the experiment has a purpose: to move the story into the realm of the personal, intimate, and emotional. Chashchin's work cannot be called neutral. The performance will either captivate or annoy, but it will definitely not leave you indifferent. This is an attempt to read Tolstoy in the language of the 21st century — through rhythm, visual nervousness, thriller energy. This play is not about an external romance, but about an internal catastrophe in which the train is no longer a symbol, but a final diagnosis.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
