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Rothschild’s Fiddle
March/April 2004
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Photograph ©Ken Reynolds
When acclaimed Moscow director Kama Ginkas brought some of Russia’s best-known actors to the campus in January to stage Rothschild’s Fiddle for the Yale Repertory Theatre, directors and producers from all over the country flocked to see Ginkas’s adaptation of the Chekhov story.

Performed in Russian with supertitles, and with third-person narration by the actors in place of conventional dialogue, the play was devastatingly moving. Valerii Barinov (pictured) played Yakov Ivanov, a village coffinmaker facing the death of his wife.  |