New production ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ premieres on 20 November

Our new production, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, premieres on Friday 20 November! And… we’ll be sharing the stage with actor Benja Bruijning.

Kreutzer Sonata is a captivating music theatre performance, based on Tolstoy’s novella of the same name. The story is told by a jealous husband who recounts how suspicion and wounded pride drove him to murder his wife. But he is not alone: his story is powered by music. The all-female string quartet, Ragazze Quartet, performs, amongst other works, Leoš Janáček’s haunting First String Quartet (Kreutzer Sonata), inspired by Tolstoy’s novella. Janáček’s Intimate Letters and (excerpts from) the string quartets by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn are also an integral part of the performance.

What few people know is that Sofia Tolstaya, Tolstoy’s wife, wrote two novels in response to her husband’s story. Inspired by her perspective, we are presenting – in collaboration with Benja Bruijning and directed by Jan-Paul Buijs – a multi-layered production about love, power, art and destruction at a time when femicide remains a painfully urgent issue.

A female perspective
Violinist Jeanita Vriens says of this performance: “We have previously performed Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata interwoven with Tolstoy’s novella, narrated by an actor. Given the recent focus on femicide, we felt it necessary this time to provide a counter-voice to the monologue of Tolstoy’s protagonist, who recounts the murder of his (in the novel, unnamed) wife. And then it turned out that Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Tolstaya, had already done this in her novel, which was only published 75 years after her death! In her story ‘Whose Fault?’, the murdered woman is given a name: Anna. Naturally, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to put both Sofia and Anna in the spotlight.”

Tour dates in The Netherlands
Thu 19 Nov – Schouwburg Het Park, Hoorn (try-out)
Frr 20 Nov – Goudse Schouwburg, Gouda (premiere)
Fri 4 Dec – Theater Bellevue, Amsterdam
Sat 16 Jan – Theater aan de Slinger, Houten
Thu 21 Jan – Schuur, Haarlem
Thu 4 Feb – Deventer Schouwburg, Deventer
Sat 6 Feb – Flint, Amersfoort
Fri 19 Feb – De Lawei, Drachten
Sat 27 Feb – Kunstmin, Dordrecht
Tue 2 Mar – Theater de Veste, Delft

For more information about the performance, including the music, credits and ticket links, see Kreutzer Sonata.

Please note: all texts are in Dutch!