“For me there is no happiness without money” – says a young and peniless woman in the drama
“The Forest”. Getting married and her happiness is being hampered by the lack of her dowery. Most of Ostrovsky’s characters are in the same situation.
Raisa Pavlova Gurminskaia, a landowner, who is now living her femininity, is squandering her wealth and waisting her forest for nothing. She is doing all this, just to keep beside her, her chosen one, a failed student in his twenties….She wants to marry her niece, held on charity, in order to disinherit her, but her niece is in love with a boy, who cannot marry a girl without dowery. Besides all this, Gurminskaia is faced with another problem: a long lost nephew appears, who is entitled for the fortune…

Ostrovsky, who was the director of the School of Fine Arts in Moscow, is a very productive writer of the Russian realism. The Forest is just one of more than 50 of Ostrovsky’s works, in which the characters are ordinary people, facing everyday problems.

The director Zsolt Harsányi – after putting on the stage the play Platonov, by Chekhov – guides the viewers once more into the world of a Russian author.