Preserving the text of the play, the amazing dialogues, the brilliant characters, we have transposed the action into today’s Russian provinces and changed only one thing: the age of the heroes. In Anton Chekhov’s play the heroines are aged around 25; now they are 55. What does that do? The heroes’ retorts, stylistically inappropriate from today’s twenty-year-olds, are absolutely organic for the older generation, the ‘Soviet’ intelligentsia. The problems of Chekhov’s classical work concerning the...