Born in the Russian port city of Taganrog in 1860, Anton Chekhov is principally known in theatrical terms for the heavyweight quadrumvirate of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. This production sees three of his lesser-known works brought to the stage.
The show’s title is derived from the principle of “Chekhov’s Gun”, a theatrical instruction within which our eponymous writer suggested that every element of a story’s narrative should be necessary and irreplaceable, whilst anything extraneous should be removed; “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
The gun is also prevalent within all three pieces, whether it be a literal firearm, or the multitudinous smoking guns that are gradually revealed in Tobacco, which are simultaneously literal and metaphorical in aspect.
Russell Kennedy is a writer & actor who forms one half of Crowd Of 2 Theatre. In addition to his translations of the three Chekhov vignettes that constitute Gun, he has also adapted A Christmas Carol, The Railway Children and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, in addition to dramatisations of shorts stories by Charles Dickens & Edgar Allen Poe. His original works include the one-act play The Crossing.
