Reviews Quotes
A HERO OF OUR TIME
“Director Vladimir Shcherban only founded HUNCHtheatre in May this year and already has a hit with this startling adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov’s 1839 novel.” — Edward Lukes
★★★★ “A blistering feat of storytelling” (The Stage)
★★★★ “A sugar rush of intrigue and excitement” (The Scotsman)
★★★★★ “Contemporary in its face and historical in its heart” (Spyinthestalls)
★★★★★ “More soon please!” (Broadway World)
★★★★ “A mesmerising spectacle” (A Younger Theatre)
★★★★ “A powerful, sweaty and ingenious piece of theatre” (BroadwayBaby)
KING LEAR
★★★★ “In Vladimir Shcherban’s production, this is King Lear endowed with the anarchic spirit of the 1941 movie Hellzapoppin. But, although the mood is initially jaunty, the production gives us a glimpse of what it must be like to live under a whimsically irrational dictatorship.” (The Guardian)
★★ “In Vladimir Shcherban’s production, this is King Lear endowed with the anarchic spirit of the 1941 movie Hellzapoppin. But, although the mood is initially jaunty, the production gives us a glimpse of what it must be like to live under a whimsically irrational dictatorship.”— The Guardian
★★★★★ “One of the greatest productions of King Lear London has ever seen... It shook the Globe from the yard to the rafters” (The Arts Desk)
★★★★ “Vladimir Shcherban’s production presents us with an utterly broken state, which punishes those who fight against corruption and causes its population to turn mad… I have never experienced a deeper silence at the Globe... ”— Dan Hutton (The Hutton Enquiry)
BEING HAROLD PINTER
★★★★★ “First-hand testimony from victims of state brutality also reminds us, in Vladimir Scherban's dazzling production, that Pinter's political plays carry a different, dynamic charge in Belarus.” (The Guardian)
★★★★ The effect is a gradual darkening of mood as we see threatened brutality turn overt. The cast wear black suits and white shirts, and Vladimir Scherban’s staging is lucid and uncluttered, so that simple effects have a big impact: someone stamping on an apple and smashing it to pulp has a clear and dreadful resonance.” ( Financial Times)
“The playwright's work, which often blended absurdism and realism, gains new meaning in Vladimir Shcherban's adaptation and direction” (Desert News)
4.48 PSYCHOSIS
‘Shcherban read the play while he was ‘living through a challenging and difficult relationship' and felt that Kane's play accurately captured his mental state. In directing the work, he was trying to find a sound that resonated with Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream (1893).’ — Glenn D’cruz, from the book Sara Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (Australia)
‘In a no-frills bar in an industrial quarter of Minsk, Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis is performed in Russian by two women (Yana Rusakevich and Olga Shantsina) moonlighting from the Belarusian National Theatre. The bar is a narrow room on the ground floor of a rundown office building next to an agricultural machinery plant. The playing area is so small, and the place is so packed, that when one of the actors lunges at the boundary my left shoulder takes the impact.’ — Tom Stoppard (The Guardian)
★★★★ ‘This was all-or-nothing theatre, love me or kill me. For an edge-of-your-seat, cold-banishing hour or so, they were the perfect conduit for Kane's fragmented outpourings, a spillage of mocking torment, loss of love, hope and self.’— Dominic Cavendish (The Telegraph)