On 18 May 2019, the Melikhovo State Literary and Memorial Museum-Reserve of A.P. Chekhov will open the Melikhovo Spring International Theatre Festival for the 20th time. The main programme includes performances based on Chekhov's works or about the writer himself. The audience is also expected to attend film screenings, meetings with directors and other special events.
Theatres from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Lipetsk, Donetsk, Volgograd, Chelyabinsk, Ryazan, Kineshma, Voronezh and Moscow regions, and the Republic of Tatarstan will present their performances at the anniversary festival. The playbill also includes productions from New York (USA), Vienna (Austria), and Temirtau (Kazakhstan).
The objectives of the Melikhov Spring are unchanged - to show all the variety of stage interpretations of the great writer's works - from the classics to the avant-garde, to present to the audience modern theatre in all its diversity through the palette of Chekhov's themes and plots.
The main feature of Melikhov Spring is the annual presence of The Seagull in the festival programme. This world-famous play was written by Chekhov in Melikhov, and it was with The Seagull, performed by the Lipetsk theatre named after L.N. Tolstoy on the veranda of the main house, that the tradition of theatre meetings in Melikhov was born. L.N. Tolstoy on the veranda of the main house started the tradition of theatre meetings in the writer's estate. In the 2019 playbill there are four "Seagulls" - completely different, each with its own accents.
Lipchans - the founders of the festival and its regular participants - this year will bring to Melikhovo not a single play, but a performance based on several stories by Anton Chekhov.
Several special events will take place as part of the 2019 festival. These include a screening of the feature film "Brothers Ch" directed by Mikhail Ugarov and based on Elena Gremina's play about the life of the Chekhov family and the traditional O.N. Efremov Memorial Day on 24 May. The estate will also host a photo exhibition "20 Years of Emotions", dedicated to the brightest moments of the Melikhov festivals of different years.
The organisers have not neglected the young audience - the two "Kashtanka" by puppet theatres from Volgograd and Ryazan are similar only at first glance. Two readings of a familiar work - touching, but conveying the mood in different ways - will be a good theatre discovery not only for kids.
The festival's grand opening on 18 May will traditionally take place on the veranda of Chekhov's main house, with a theatrical programme "Dedication to the Seagull" and a performance by the Melikhov Spring 2019 participating groups. Also on the opening day, THE LAMBS THEATER LAB (New York) will show the play The Proposal, followed by a meeting with directors Peter Kingsley (USA) and Aubrey Malor (Australia). At the end of the opening day in Melikhov, a film screening of the play Uncle Vanya by the Evgeny Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre will take place.
