When will Summer be?

Under the direction of Olga Barabás, director from Târgu Mures, rehearsals have begun for the latest production of When will Summer be?, the script of which was written by the director based on Chekhov’s short stories and novels.

“It’s going to be exciting for me to do this work, I feel, because on the one hand it feels like home again in Sfantu Gheorghe, and on the other hand, because obviously the company has changed a lot since 2008. There are new members I haven’t worked with before, and I think that will be good for the workflow, because it makes you more curious and sharpens your concentration. Obviously I’ve seen the company’s performances over the years, none of the actors are completely unknown to me, but they know me less. I’m confident that this will be a good meeting for all of us,” said the director after rehearsals began.

Olga Barabás often works from her own script. As she said, the central theme of the performance is friendship, which she returns to again and again. She first explored this theme 25 years ago, perhaps, in a production of Alexanderplatz, starring Loránd Váta and László Mátray, and decided then that she would one day take a closer look at the friendship of two women, which works very differently from the friendship of men. Now came the opportunity, inspired in fact by a photo she had seen while leafing through a Chekhov monograph, where the writer was posing for a photograph with two of his lady friends.

He admits that Chekhov is very close to her, perhaps most of all because he is a writer of everyday life, capturing events that we know so well. “He doesn’t moralize, he doesn’t judge, he smiles a little at the little man at most, but for the most part he approaches him with great empathy. In fact, he writes about life as it is and how we live it. He writes about our desires, about waiting for great things to happen, but life is inexorably going its own way, and we either drift along or try to resist it,” the director said of Chekhov.

When will summer be? is scheduled to premiere in mid-April.