The “Seagull” fighting Thomas Ostermeier – The World

Le Monde | 24/05/2016 at 9:06 • Updated 24/05/2016 at 14:28 | By Fabienne Darge

This is a large black and white, representing men face gaunt, under both hot and empty. She slams, when we enter the room of the Odeon Theatre, where it comes to The Seagull Chekhov, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. The photo was taken at the

prison in Sakhalin, east of Siberia, probably at the end of the XIX ^th century. It sets the tone: it is a Seagull to fight Thomas Ostermeier sign. A Seagull -manifeste, which is already much talk or argue, since its creation at the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne in late February, and even more since the first Paris on Friday 20 May.

However, it is also a Seagull beautiful, that does not stick to the highly political reading that the director of Berlin Schaubühne made the play, but unfolds the tragic and universality through great actors, committed body and soul – how could it be otherwise with Chekhov

the writer, who was also a physician, spent three months in Sakhalin in 1890 to observe and tell a kind of story in the long term that we can not recommend reading ( the Sakhalin Island , Gallimard, “Folio”), the appalling living conditions of the convicts. For him, there was a before and after that trip. “Before I left, The Kreutzer Sonata was an event for me, now I find it ridiculous and incoherent” he wrote thus to Suvorin, the editor of Time …