Drei Schwestern

In the organizer's words:

Anton Chekhov - and with him modern theater - entered the 20th century with a drama about everyday life, longing and failure: "Three Sisters", first performed in 1901 at the Moscow Artists' Theatre, is the chronicle of a family in which Chekhov strikes a balance between melancholy and joie de vivre, realism and stylization.

Australian author and director Simon Stone has taken Chekhov's famous drama as the starting point for his new version, which was named "Play of the Year 2017" by "Theater heute", and has thematically located it in the here and now with fast-paced dialog, subtle character studies and the ambivalence of the characters that reliably results from this.

"Do we even deserve to be happy? Because maybe we're always looking for the opposite. So we sabotage all the opportunities that life gives us."

Chekhov's provincial characters thus become urban seekers of meaning, who, in the age of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, dwell on childhood memories and visions of the future in their vacation home between conversations about the decline of the left and Donald Trump. It's about the existential and the comic, about hopes and dreams - and about using these to combat the ever-present threat of the banalities of everyday life, loneliness and despair.

With his radical reinterpretations of canonized classics of dramatic literature, Simon Stone is considered one of the most influential directors of contemporary international theater and was invited to the 2017 Berlin Theatertreffen with this production at Theater Basel.

"Chekhov's plays all begin with the statement that they are set in the present, and I take him literally. The present never ends. At some point, people started to set them in the past because they thought the author meant his own present by the present. But they were supposed to reflect contemporary society." Simon Stone

Takeover of the world premiere production of Theater Basel

ARTISTIC DIRECTION

Production Simon Stone

Stage Lizzie Clachan

Costumes Mel Page

Music Stefan Gregory

Lighting Cornelius Hunziker, Gerrit Jurda

Dramaturgy Constanze Kargl