Tatiana Tolstoy: SONYA

"Sonya is a bit simpleminded, a bit plain, a bit lonely. But she has talents: she can cook, sew and get on other people’s nerves. One day, she receives a passionate, serious love-letter. Sonya’s heart is aflame. Little does she know that malicious Ada has written the letter. It will change Sonya’s life forever." Sonya, a short story by the contemporary Russian writer Tatiana Tolstoy, the granddaughter of the famous writer Aleksey Tolstoy, was adapted and set on stage by Alvis Hermanis, one of the most influential theatre directors of his generation. Born in 1965, Hermanis completes his studies in acting in Riga and until 1990, when he moves to New York, predominantly works as a film actor. He returns to Riga in 1993 and starts directing his first shows in the New Riga Theatre founded in 1992. Due to his modern theatrical sensibility and his premeditated choice of projects (Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Marquis de Sade, The Picture of Dorian Gray), Hermanis soon becomes a favourite "generational" director, which in 1997 brings him to the position of art director of the New Riga Theatre. Turning "his" theatre into one of the most propulsive theatres in the Baltic States, Hermanis has simultaneously been developing his own poetics of directing, one based on the shifting of boundaries of scenic expression and uniting it with the language of visual arts and media, which implies experimenting with a variety of signs, images, and cultural concepts and codes. That has resulted in the appearance of intriguing shows (The Inspector General, By Gorky, A Long Life, Latvian Stories) performed and awarded on numerous European festivals.

What is it that makes Hermanis’ theatre so fascinating? It may be the characters of his productions, who are ordinary people and their stories are those from every-day life, and also that Hermanis, with an admirable sense of accurate detail, finds the something hiding under perhaps a banal surface, something which is dramatic, essential, which is common to us all. Hermanis brings humanity back to the theatre. It is a humanity of understanding and sympathy, in contrast to the theatre of estrangement and matter-of-factness, so widespread these days. But his view is not one perceived through pink glasses, as we might conclude. Hermanis can be as cruel and merciless as the "coolest" of artists. The spectrum of emotions which he raises by his works is considerably broad, while at the same time he manages to generate those that are most contradictory... Such is the production of Sonja where we see a world full of pulsing dreams sharply contrasted with reality... Although Hermanis’ theatrical language seems hyper-realistic..., in this play he uses parody, irony and citations of theatrical tradition by which the realistic becomes an intensified theatricality and an autonomous world of art. The stage, for instance, is a citation of a spyglass stage, the "fourth wall" theatre, the acting is based on detailed gestures taken from reality, while only the main hero of the story, Sonya, is played by a man… Even though Hermanis´ theatre stirs the audiences’ emotions and gains its sympathies, he does so only on the level which allows the interference of grotesque and tragicomic dramaturgy into his productions. And through such a parodying view, which is a mixture of mockery and understanding, we, once again, remember loneliness, the fear of old age and death, the longing for love and the fulfilment of our dreams. Thus, the "non-high-flown" and human message of Sonya could be: Our happiness rests in ourselves.
Martina Vannayová, from the booklet of festival Divadelna Nitra