Anna Karenina’s death has been re-enacted in the minds of countless readers over the years. Now she is brought back to life, carved straight out of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, into a 30 minute play by Rhodes University student Megan Wright.
Anna Karenina’s death has been re-enacted in the minds of countless readers over the years. Now she is brought back to life, carved straight out of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, into a 30 minute play by Rhodes University student Megan Wright.
Entitled Blue Moon, the modern, South African adaptation of the classic Russian novel is Wright’s Honours production for this year’s Young Director’s Season at the Rhodes University Drama Department.
After reading Anna Karenina earlier this year, Wright fell in love with the novel and decided to make it the focus of her directing.
“Throughout directing I’ve found my style through devising and adapting classic novels, but giving them a new, sort of reimagining,” said Wright.
“I like adding a bit of emotional upliftment and quirky change as well as adding contemporary localisation to the tales.”
Through a combination of what Wright calls magical realism, absurdism, and epic theatre, the play uses the key characters and events in the realist fiction novel such as Anna, Vronsky, the train, and the horse. It aims to adapt Tolstoy’s work into a fantastical social satire with a heart-wrenching core.
Wright explains how Blue Moon started off as an earlier devised Japanese version of Anna Karenina called ‘Kazuro’, but found that it distracted from the original story. Now through the use of various South African themes such as live djembe drum music, Wright says the piece which is devised by her and the cast, has maintained an Eastern style in a framework that purely serves the story and guides the work.
By making use of the basic framework of Anna Karenina and an ever present, ethereal blue light, Wright’s cast aims to show the audience the spontaneity and recklessness of human nature under certain circumstances, and the consequences that are reaped and realised after “the haze of the mist and the blue moon are lifted.”
“The blue light is an almost never-reached ideal that is always going to be better than what you have in your life” said Wright.
“Tolstoy’s biggest thing was to take cognisance of our happiness, our immediate reality and our moral sense of being, because essentially it’s all we’ve got.”
Previous years have seen YDS showcase the works of a number of Honours directing students. This year, however, Wright is the only student in the Honours directing course, which sees the spotlight shine solely on Blue Moon.
“It’s lonely and it’s a bit scary, but it’s been great. The department has given me a lot of support and I’ve had time to devise and have a process showing which gave me a whole semester to create Blue Moon” said Wright.
A darkly satirical take on a classic story, Blue Moon aims to weave together traditional Russian, and contemporary South African class systems as well as entertain audiences with this classic tale of love, tragedy, and mortality.
Young Director’s Season will be showing on Friday 29 and Saturday 30 August at 7.30pm in the Box Theatre. Tickets are R30 to the public, R25 to students, and R15 to pensioners and schools.
