Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol MARRIAGE

ЖенИДба, 1842

Comedy
Translated by Josip Vidmar
Directed by Diego de Brea

 

Premiere: March 2012

 

 

Agafya Tikhonovna is getting married. Her aunt Arina recommends her to take a merchant, someone similar to her late father, however, the matchmaker Fyokla is looking for someone, who would suit her better – perhaps a nobleman, or a respected gentleman… A sworn bachelor and an imperial counsellor, Podkolyosin finally decides to marry too, yet he can not choose among all the brides, recommended to him by Fyokla. So, now he has already been postponing this annoying errand for three months…  His friend Kochkaryov drags the lingerer over to Agafya's. By a marvellous coincidence, a colourful party of faded bachelors, executors, officers and former sailors, fished around the town by Fyokla as candidates, suitable according to their stature and status, gathers in the timid bride's house.  After the suitors first convince themselves of the value of the bride and her house, the number of her fox fur coats and her knowledge of French, they start to fight. Agafya, overwhelmed by this wonderful choice, nearly decides to pick up her future husband by drawing lots. During the Kochkaryov's enthusiastic intervention, Podkolyosin is fidgeting in the local sweetshop…  

 

The father of the Russian realism - writer, dramatist, humorist and bachelor, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, best known for his novel Dead Souls, satiric comedy Revisor and short story The Overcoat, is parodying in his Marriage the prosaic reasons to why people get married. The first variety of satire, based on the Russian traditional matrimony of his time, resulting from successful matchmaking, Gogol wrote under the title Suitors, some ten years before its original version was premiered in 1842. Due to its unexpected denouement, Marriage agitated the audiences in St Petersburg and Moscow at first, later however it firmly established itself as a part of the permanent Russian theatre repertoire.    

 

I don't want him! I don't want him! He has a beard: when he eats, everything is going to drip down his beard. No, no, I don't want him!