Box Office

Box Office

• Single ticket sales for just this show begin February 2, 2016
• Box Office is open Monday to Saturday: 12:00pm - 8:30pm
• Ticket sales in person, or charge by phone: 250.721.8000
• Ticket information, prices and policies
• Performed in the Chief Dan George Theatre
• Preview Nights: February 9 & 10 ($7.50 tickets only available after 5pm on show night)

Playwright

Michael Frayn (1933 – present) is an award-winning British playwright, novelist, reporter and translator. Raised in Ewell, Surrey, he spent two years of his early adulthood in compulsory military service for the United Kingdom, a time during which he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists. This experience would eventually lead to Frayn becoming one of the world’s best-respected translators of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1957, Frayn worked as a reporter and columnist for both The Guardian and The Observer. He developed into a satirist and comic writer, eventually focusing on writing novels during the 1960s and plays in the 1970s. Two of his earliest plays, Alphabetical Order (1977) and Donkeys’ Years (1977), were both immediately welcomed with critical success, receiving the London Evening Standing Award for Best Comedy and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy respectively. Later, Frayn’s 1982 comedy Noises Off also received both of these awards, and in 1998 his play Copenhagen earned a Tony Award for Best Play.

Frayn continues to create new works as a novelist and playwright to this day. His latest novel, Skios, was published in 2012, and his most recent theatrical work, Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short Entertainments,premiered in 2014.

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) was a Russian playwright, author and physician whose plays have been translated, produced, and acclaimed around the globe. Born in Taganrog, Russia, Chekhov moved to Moscow at the age of 19, where he immediately enrolled in the city university’s medical faculty. After graduating and becoming a doctor in 1884, Chekhov also began freelance writing as a journalist and writer of comic sketches. In the late 1880s, Chekhov abandoned this work for more serious writing and began experimenting in the world of drama. His first major play, Wood Demon, the four-act play that would eventually be transformed into the classic Uncle Vanya (1897), was first published in 1888 along with a host of one-act farces. Although his 1896 play The Seagull was badly received at its premiere, two years later it would be revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre to great success. This made way for Chekhov’s last two plays, Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), which were specifically written for the Moscow Art Theatre. Unfortunately, Chekhov died of tuberculosis less than six months after The Cherry Orchard’s premiere,

Shortly after his death, translations of Chekhov’s plays and short stories would come to earn him high praise from world-class contemporaries including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and George Bernard Shaw. His theatrical works continue to be produced over a century later and have inspired countless adaptations across various art forms.

The Director & preshow lecture

Peter McGuire   Director

Beginning at Victoria’s McPherson Playhouse, Peter has enjoyed a 30-year career in the professional theatre that has included stage management, production management, talent management, administration and producing. He has worked at several major regional theatres including long-term residencies at the National Arts Centre, the Charlottetown Festival and the Stratford Festival. He has toured regionally, nationally and internationally and worked for the Maybox Group of Theatres in London’s West End. Between 2003 and 2005 he was Associate Conservatory Director at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Recently, Peter directed Picnic at the Phoenix, where he teaches acting, directing, production, and introductory theatre courses to students from across the campus.

• Listen online to Peter McGuire talk about Wild Honey