The Queen of Spades at the Liteiny Theater

For two days off, on the 24th and 25th of November, in the evenings, they played cards in the St. Petersburg Theater on Liteiny. The theater’s chief director Igor Larin presented to the audience his new work, the premiere performance “The Queen of Spades”, and his first staging in a new position.

On the stage of the "Liteiny" theater, Igor Larin first appeared as a student. At this time, the theater was called "Drama and Comedy Theater", "Theater on Foundry", he began to be called in 1991. The first directorial work of Igor Larin in this theater was the performance Medea staged in 1994. In 2005, Larin staged the play “Love and Death of Zinaida Reich,” which is still part of the theater’s repertoire. In the summer of 2012, Igor Larin was approved as the chief director of the Theater on Liteiny.

The idea of the play was born by Igor Larin for a long time. The director went for many years to its embodiment, more than once turning to the Pushkin heritage, making sketches for the play, trying them on the stage. The premiere performance was the result of the director’s long reflections on the fate of the heroes of the famous Pushkin novel, the plot of which is still modern.

Another famous critic Belinsky wrote that The Queen of Spades in its content is more like a joke than a story. Igor Larin designated the genre of his work as a “mystical joke”, showing in his production that fate can turn a person into a card that can be played as she pleases. The performance became much closer to the work of Pushkin than the famous opera by Tchaikovsky.

The day before the premiere, a press conference took place in the theater’s premises on the Liteiny where the new chief director talked about the premiere and shared creative plans for the theater team in the new season.

Ludmila Trautmane