In recent months, Mikhail Chekhov’s Riga Russian Theater has received special media attention due to issues conditionally related to the theater’s artistic activity. At the beginning of the year, the Ministry of Culture decided not to extend the employment contract with the current director of the theater, Dan Björk, and to announce a competition for the position of a member of the theater board. The Ministry has named several reasons for this action, namely complaints have been received about Bjorka’s management style and even possible disloyalty to the Latvian state. The leader of the accusations called them false, and the theater team expressed their support for her.
Meanwhile, the passions are not only around the Chekhov Theater, but also on its stage – Viestura Kairis’s “Hamlet” is expected in April, while at the beginning of February, the premiere of the classic Woody Allen’s one-act play “Central Park West” took place in the Great Hall, which qualifies for the status of a non-serious conversation – to talk about the central theme of his work, that is, love and human relationships, through Allen’s characteristic comic situations. Allen’s last production in Latvia should be mentioned as Dž. J. Gillinger’s kitschy and rather weak version of “Bullets over Broadway” – Allen is not a frequent occurrence in our theaters, which seems strange, because for many decades he has been able to offer useful material for productions, namely, important questions of household and audience (also in Latvia) in recognizable situations, dressed in fluent language, filled with bright dialogues. Perhaps what deters Allen from directing is the high probability of turning his text into a piece of outright entertainment – something that Allen himself (almost always) is able to do with his screenplays in films, other directors are not always able to do. Therefore, it is all the more interesting to see what director Sergey Golomazov and the rest of the Chekhov Theater team managed to do with Allen.
