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Tolstoy's Wife
Starring: Jennifer Claire
Showing Friday 13 October to Saturday 14 October 2006
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Performance Times: FOR TWO NIGHTS ONLY at 8pm
call our box office on 01253 290190
Group bookings call 01253 743232
BE TRANSPORTED TO ST PETERSBURG, 1850, AS A WOMAN RELIVES HER LIFE WITH ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST RENOWNED WRITERS
European premiere
A drama based on the last diary of Countess Sonya Tolstoy
by Jennifer Claire (2002)
Directed by Will Pomerantz
Starring JENNIFER CLAIRE
The Countess Sonya Tolstoy, waits in the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, for her interview with Tsar Alexander III, she has come to beg the Tsar, to lift the censorship on the Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy’s latest work, which has shocked all of Russia, including Sonya and the Tsarina.
Sonya Behrs, the Countess Tolstoy married a young girl of eighteen, passionately in love with the thirty eight year old Tolstoy, who in his life time was acknowledged as one of the greatest writers in the world and founder creator of the Tolstoyian philosophy, a man so popular in Russia, he was called the second Tsar.
The play is Sonya’s story, the love she felt for him despite all the trials of a fifty year marriage. She bore him thirteen children, nine of whom lived. But Sonya refused to follow his philosophy, of renunciation and abstinence, she has her children to look after, she will not see them destitute.
Tolstoy, all his life, struggled with his sexuality, always striving for a celibacy he never managed to attain. His spiritual reliance and love for his chief disciple, the fanatic and pedantic Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, annoys Sonya as she distrusts him, and eventually comes vehemently to hate, till Tolstoy, an old man of eighty two, can no longer stand the hysterical jealousy of his wife, nor the possessive manipulation of his devoted disciple. Tolstoy flees his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, hoping to find peace, but he becomes ill and lies waiting to die in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo, surrounded by all his children, Chertkov and other followers, while his wife waits for their permission to see her husband, alone in a railway carriage.
In the play we meet Gorky Turgenev and Chekhov, Tolstoy’s contemporaries, and see life on the country estate of Yasnaya Polyana, a sometimes harsh yet graceful life, that was shortly to disappear forever in the upheaval and trauma of the Bolshevik Revolution, at the end of Sonya’s life.
Jennifer Claire is a leading playwright and character actress in the Australian theatre firmament. Born in Lancashire and with early experience in English theatre she moved to Australia in the late 1960s, since when she has played over two hundred major roles in classical and new drama for the Australian state theatre companies, made five films and appeared in many television series. Since the 1980s she has also lived in Bali writing plays at her exotic retreat at Lake Ubud: The Butterflies of Kalimantan and Siestas in a Pink Hotel have been produced by Sydney Theatre Company, the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, Hole in the Wall Theatre, Perth and the Women in the Arts Festival.
Tolstoy’s Wife was commissioned by The Culture Project, New York where it was premiered at the Bleecker Street Theatre in 2002 and later performed at the Montsalvat Festival in Victoria, Australia. Grand Theatre audiences in 2006 witnessed the excitements and accomplishments of Australian acting when Bell Shakespeare Company performed The Comedy of Errors: Jennifer Claire’s performance in Tolstoy’s Wife will delight Lancashire theatregoers in equal measure.
Presented By: The Grand Theatre, by arrangement with The Bleecker Street Theatre, New York and The Women Centre Stage Festival
Booking information
All Seats £8.00 - Concessions £6.00
For tickets call our Box Office on 01253 290190
Group Booking: 01253 743232
