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Arts feature

How to think like Chekhov or Turgenev

The art of adapting Russian plays – and novels and stories – for the stage

30 November 2013

9:00 AM

30 November 2013

9:00 AM

I recently met an A-level English student who had never heard of Pontius Pilate. How is it possible to reach the age of 18 — to be applying to university to read English and European Literature — and never to have come across the man who asked the unanswerable question: what is truth?

This student had completed a course in theatre studies, having read hardly any Shakespeare, nor any of his contemporaries, none of the Greeks — Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides — nothing from the Restoration, no Ibsen, no Shaw, and certainly no Schiller — though he had been given the role...

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Fortune’s Fool is previewing at the Old Vic from 6 December and opens on 16 December; Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are in rep at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 11 December.

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