The Forest

A rich landowner uses charity and love for the fellow people as a mask to tyrannically rule over the fates of her relatives and subordinates and arbitrarily chart their life paths and intimate relationships. However, her wealth is crumbling because of the concealed wastefulness, and her plans are rocked by the arrival of her poor nephew, the tragedy actor Gennady and his wingman, a comic actor Arkady. Their unexpected visit causes the relationships on the estate to get tangled up in a colourful comedy in which scenes of love and fight for money follow each other, as well as funny caprices and existential distress, satire about provincial life and theatre.

In Forest, Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886) merged drama and comedy into an unusually rich theatre work, filled with vivacity and humaneness. He wrote it in the period following Tsar Alexander II's reforms that triggered the transition from feudalism to an approximate of a market system and in it caught the image of Russia of the time and its social strata: ruined landowners, the ever-richer merchants, serfs that even liberated remained the same poverty stricken people with no rights … and destitute artists. The adaptation of the text was prepared by Egon Savin, one of the most important contemporary Serbian directors, who will work in Slovenia for the first time.