Interview with Adaptor & Director, Eliot Giuralarocca

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Tell us about your production, In and Out of Chekhov's Shorts

In and Out of Chekhov’s Shorts brings to life some of Anton Chekhov’s celebrated short stories. I wanted to create a dynamic, exhilarating piece of theatre, with original live music and presented in a style that celebrates and relishes the theatricality of storytelling itself. I started working on adapting these by thinking of them as a bit like folk tales to be spoken aloud as if sat around a fire on a winter’s night. I’ve created an ensemble of 5 actor/musicians to perform them and we’ll play a troupe of nomadic Russian Gypsies that arrive in front of the audience pulling their carts behind them, carts that contain everything needed to tell the stories, - costumes, props, musical instruments, chairs, rugs and so on. We want the audience to feel that when the evening is finished, we will simply pack up and move on to tell our stories somewhere else.

Which of Chekhov's stories are you bringing to the stage and why?

I’ve always loved Chekhov’s short stories, I first read them about 20 years ago and since then they have always stayed with me. They are wonderful hymns to the absurdity of everyday life, as memorable and bracing as jumping into a cold plunge pool after a hot sauna! The five stories that I have chosen to bring to the stage are The Chemist’s Wife, At a Summer Villa, The Lady with a Little Dog, An Avenger and The Bear. By turns romantic, hilarious, odd and memorable, at their heart, these are stories about people desperately trying to connect with each other sometimes comically, sometimes poignantly. Each story is complete in itself, but seen together they map out the arc of a relationship, following the progress of idealised youthful love with all it’s excitement, yearning and disappointments, through mid-life cynicism and infidelity, to the results of jilted love and vengeance.

The very best stories can shape how we see the world and offer us a glimpse of our own reflections. They encapsulate a particular moment in time that is at once personal and universal. I’ve always believed in the enduring power and importance of storytelling; actors and audience sharing together in an act of communal imagination. It is theatre at it’s purest, offering us the potential to transcend the moment we chance to live in and to imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s time and space, providing a window to see how other people live, how they react in different situations and maybe in turn helping us to imagine how we would feel and what we would do.

You're working with Chekhov's short stories as opposed to his plays. How have you found adapting these for the stage?

Chekhov's stories are intrinsically dramatic, with interesting scenarios, bold characters and subtle and often surprising dialogue that needed very little embellishment from me. I’ve really enjoyed the process of adapting them for the stage. I wanted to keep the ‘storytelling’ form of characters talking to the audience directly which allows them to share their thoughts, feelings and attitude to what unfolding and to comment on the action and I have tried to stay as close to the original source material as possible while being quite bold in editing and making things work dramatically, - if part of a story can be better told musically or visually we’ve done that. We’ve added music, underscore and songs and I’ve adapted the material very much with a cast of five in mind. I’ve also tried to interweave the stories whenever possible to give a sense that characters can travel through one story and appear in another.

How has the creative process been? Were you solely responsible for devising the production, or did it come about in a collaborative way with the cast?

I formed Dragonboy Productions to focus on creating and developing new work for the theatre with a particular interest in storytelling, adaptations and working with actor/musicians to create exciting and engaging theatre performed with original live music. I strongly believe in utilising all the talents of the people involved in a project to create work that could only have been brought into being by this particular group of people working together at this particular time. I conceived the idea for the show, adapted the stories, briefed the designers and so on so in that sense the vision for the piece was mine but creating a piece of theatre never happens in isolation and I have had the great good fortune to work with some wonderfully patient and creative collaborators. My creative team are a tight unit that I have worked with on many occasions, and I was also careful to cast actors who I felt would work well in an ensemble and who brought something unique to the project, performers that took the work seriously as well as possessing a sense of fun and playfulness. 

Tom Neill has written, created and orchestrated the music beautifully and I believe theatre is often most potent when it is most simple and one of the most important aspects in creating this show was to find the most economical but theatrically inventive way to tell each story. Because I’m performing in the show as well as directing it, I have also tried to create a dynamic environment in which the actors feel that they can really play, discover, create and ultimately take ownership of the material themselves.

What do you hope your audience take away from seeing your production of Chekhov's Shorts?

We’ve taken a dynamic approach to presenting Chekhov with a storytelling ensemble of actor/musicians and the plan was to create a show filled with vibrant theatricality, full of music and memorable visual images while bringing out the humour and romanticism of Chekhov's stories and challenging any preconception that his work is inaccessible or sombre. We want to engage and excite our audience and have them comes out of the theatre on a high!