House Party Platonov

Jean-Jacques Lerrant Prize at the 2019 edition of the Lyon Theatre Authors’ Festival.

Right then. Take Platonov. Platonov, that character of Chekhov’s from a muddled, chaotic early play, as powerful as it is botched. Take him, strip him of Chekhov and plunge him into a party of young people in Lyon, Paris or elsewhere, around the year 2016. All aged between twenty and thirty: students, young artists, intellectuals or the unemployed. Plunge Platonov into the party, that codified social setting where tiredness, alcohol or dancing reveal us in spite of ourselves, and see what happens.

House party Platonov is made up of diverse and often unrelated elements: dialogues, monologues, dramaturgical notes, fragments of a possible novel, Wikipedia entries and diary entries. Between the themes of absent fathers, the magnetism of love, boozy evenings and so-called ‘lost generations’, the play indirectly explores the difficulty of being human today, yesterday, from Chekhov to the present day.

In short: it’s a right mess, in twenty-seven parts.

[NOTE: if “mess” is a bit too much, it can easily be replaced with “chaos”!]