Viktor Potapeshkin

A young accountant from a provincial settlement suffers from the tyranny of his mother and is looking for an answer to the reasons for his father's suicide. The desire to change the direction of his life pushes him to flee to Moscow, where by the will of fate he finds himself in the life of an underground casino.

Preserving the text of the play, the amazing dialogues, the brilliant characters, we have transposed the action into today’s Russian provinces and changed only one thing: the age of the heroes. In Anton Chekhov’s play the heroines are aged around 25; now they are 55. What does that do? The heroes’ retorts, stylistically inappropriate from today’s twenty-year-olds, are absolutely organic for the older generation, the ‘Soviet’ intelligentsia. The problems of Chekhov’s classical work concerning the search for a meaning in life, the loss of ideals, the fear before death without having achieved anything in the world, the desire to be useful to others – all these things are also a typical attribute of the Soviet intelligentsia.

With her the husband and her mother Katya lives in a small provincial town and works at the local factory. The mother suddenly falls ill and decides to transfer her property to her son, Katya’s brother. Katya feels this decision to be unjust, and begins to fight for her inheritance. In pursuit of imaginary material well-being Katya decides on a most desperate act.

After depleting Earth's resources for centuries, humankind's survival requires an exodus to outer space. An international expedition is quickly formed to find a suitable new planet, but when plans go awry, the crew is suddenly stranded without power on a strange planet, where something unimaginable lies in wait.