A Reading of Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Bet’ with Shivam Vig | By the Green Room

The student-led theatre effort at NLS, The Green Room, is organising a reading of Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Bet‘ with Shivam Vig, a Bengaluru-based theatre practitioner and director of ‘Poor Vanya.’

The reading will take place at NAB 101 from 5 to 7 PM on December 10, 2025.

The Green Room is a nod to the intimate, lively backstage space in theatres where artists gather before a performance. Here is the exciting schedule for this trimester.

About the Short Story

We began this circle with Chekhov and given his enduring ability to capture the human condition with precision and compassion, he returns again. The Bet is one of Chekhov’s most striking philosophical tales. The story begins with a heated debate between a banker and a young lawyer over whether capital punishment is more humane than solitary imprisonment. Their argument escalates into a reckless wager: the lawyer commits to spending fifteen years in voluntary isolation to prove that life—any life—is preferable to death. Over the course of this confinement, Chekhov offers a profound study of human endurance, materialism, knowledge, and the hollowness of worldly desire. The ending resists easy moral conclusions, prompting us to reconsider what we value in freedom, suffering, wealth, and learning.

Since this is a work of prose rather than a script, the session will take the form of an open discussion on the story’s narrative, characters, and thematic tensions.