Performance - “Autumn Sonata”

As part of the 6th International Theatre Festival “Theatrical Baltica”

Performance - “Autumn Sonata”

Theater “Lestnitsa” (Israel)

Director – Yekaterina Pastukhova

Theater “Lestnitsa” is an independent theater in Israel, created for a live and honest conversation with the audience.

We turn to works in which a person faces an important choice, seeks closeness, and tries to understand themselves and the other. For us, theater is not just a stage and a performance - first and foremost, it is a space for meeting: actor with audience, past with present, literature with a living human intonation.

“Lestnitsa” brings together artists for whom psychological depth, respect for the author’s text, and genuine stage experience are essential. We create intimate theater close to the audience, in which the viewer is right next to the characters, hears every word, and gradually becomes not an outside observer, but a participant in what is happening.

The theater’s name has symbolic meaning for us. Each performance is the next step - on the path toward understanding people, sharing their feelings, and true dialogue.

“Autumn Sonata”

After seven years of separation, the famous pianist Charlotte arrives at her daughter Eva’s home. At first glance, it seems like a long-awaited family reunion: a cozy house, a quiet evening, memories, and hope of regaining the closeness once lost. But little by little, behind the polite words, old grievances, unspoken pain, and questions emerge that both women have tried to avoid for years.

Why was a mother, who was able to move audiences with her art, unable to hear her own child? Is it possible to forgive a person who loved, but always chose herself? And after so many years, is it still possible to change a relationship in which both are at once guilty and wounded?

Ingmar Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata” is a stark story about a mother and daughter, about love that can hurt, and about the attempt to finally tell each other the truth.

It is an intimate psychological performance about memory and loneliness, guilt and forgiveness - and about the deeply human, sometimes painful need to be seen and heard by the very person who is closest.