Quai d’Angers

In this forceful work by Maxim Gorki, a woman fights to save her family business in pre-revolutionary Russia. A portrait of a fascinating woman of iron, portrayed by Christiane Cohendy, winner of the Molière for best actress in 1996.

"I have written a play about a mother," Gorki said in 1910. But she is no ordinary mother - for Vassa is above all the head of a business. Energetic, intransigent, pitiless toward her son’s mediocrity and the intrigues of her brother in law, Vassa is ready to do anything to avoid ruin - including breaking the law.
"The real subject of the play," notes director Gilberte Tsaï, "is the relationships between the men and women in a specific family. Not love, but the forces that pit the members of this family against each other in an interminable combat which, surprisingly, is dominated by the female factor, the world of women. Gorki shows us this via the portrait of Vassa Geleznova, a wily woman of action, but first and foremost a mother whose tenderness toward her eldest daughter Anna and her daughter in law Ludmilla is at times terrifying. So what we in effect see in this work is the matriarchy in action - a matriarchy that’s an unstoppable force, like a bulldozer."

Ms. Tsaï will be staging the first, darker and more violent version of Vassa Geleznova from 1910. For the past eight years she has been the director of Centre Dramatique National de Montreuil where she recently directed Ce soir on improvise based on the works of Luigi Pirandello and Une nuit à la bibliothèque by Jean-Christophe Bailly.