Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. John Freedman
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directness and unblinking honesty. The ideal plot was not something dreamed up by a creative mind it was drawn from real events and the experiences of real people.
That was the theory. What took place was something different and more complex. There never were definite boundaries or characteristics that would have allowed us to declare with certainty that a specific play or playwright belonged to the new drama. The writers coming out of Kolyada’s school in Yekaterinburg wrote gritty, uncouth, socially-oriented plays that seemingly should have satisfied most in the new drama crowd. But the majority of them, Kolyada included, denied kinship with, and even expressed an open hostility to, the style. Meanwhile, some of the biggest early new drama successes plainly violated the “no metaphor, no literature” rules. Ivan Vyrypaev’s Oxygen, a flagship of the movement, was a highly poetic piece that creatively adapted segments of the Ten Commandments in a modern setting. Klim, a playwright and director who composes richly nuanced texts carved out of great novels, plays and fairy tales of the past, had one of the biggest successes at the first New Drama Festival with “The Active Side of Eternity,” a bold, interpretive dramatization of the writings of Carlos Castaneda. In fact, Klim’s rich, experimental texts were antithetical to the strivings of new drama. Maksym Kurochkin, a central and active figure in the new drama movement, is the author of highly imaginative plays that experiment with language, time, plot and structure on a level with the best poets in the Russian literary canon.
As a term, then, new drama is a knot of contradictions. In fact, it cannot be pinned down and, therefore, cannot be used precisely in a simple, descriptive way. None of that means that what took place under and around the banner of new drama was not a powerful, transformative force for Russian theater. This we can state with certainty: the new drama movement exerted an enormous influence on theater art. Russian theater before and after new drama are two vastly different cultural spaces.
New drama is probably best understood as a broad phenomenon that applies more to a time period than to any specific manner of writing. Crucially, the new drama era provoked vigorous, important, strategic and artistic arguments. It encouraged those who never thought about writing plays to become playwrights – one of the quintessential new drama authors, Yury Klavdiev, has said he thought theater and writing plays were a boring pursuit until he saw a live performance of Vyrypaev’s Oxygen. The theory and reality of the new drama crusade inspired directors and actors who were fed up with the same old Chekhov-Ostrovsky treadmill to seek new avenues of expression. The plays that follow bear witness to, and were instruments of, that change.
The Plays, chronologically
Maksym Kurochkin’s Kitchen, written and produced in 2000, is one of the watersheds of recent Russian drama. Before it, there was Olga Mukhina’s hit Tanya-Tanya in 1996, a play that appeared when virtually no one in Russia would admit a contemporary could write a good play. As Tanya-Tanya ushered in an era when new plays again became a natural part of the theatrical process, Kitchen ushered in the age in which new plays would become a status symbol for theaters. As any explosion might, it blew out the walls still hindering the forward path for new writers and new plays. It was grossly misinterpreted by the critics – not at all an unusual thing – but it was a huge hit with audiences, and it developed a fierce cult following among the young. It is the only play in this selection that was mounted on a big stage, directed and acted by a star – the matinee idol Oleg Menshikov.
Kitchen brings to mind Henry James’s designation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace as a “large loose baggy monster.” Lurching back and forth from the time of the Nibelungs and Attila the Hun to contemporary Russia, it surely is that. It is a mix of high poetry and scullery chatter. It is an intellectual and philosophical drama, and it is a comic travesty of history. It is a spoof of hip Russia in 2000 and a profoundly moral work that engages some of the most painful, intricate debates of its time. It questions whether mankind has advanced at all since the Dark Ages, and seeks to debate what surely is one of the most sinister conundrums of our time: What do we do with cultural memory? We are doomed, the play suggests, if we forget our past. But we are damned if we remember it, for surely, then, we will be compelled to seek revenge for past offenses against us. If that sounds like a dark place to leave a play, it is always worth remembering that the best art asks questions, it doesn’t answer them. That is for the rest of us to do.
Emerging shortly after Kurochkin was Vasily Sigarev. In 2002 a Moscow production of his play Plasticene signaled the appearance of a distinctive writer. With its visions of violence and cruelty, it became one of the poster plays of the early new drama movement. Sigarev was one of several writers from Yekaterinburg to achieve international renown. Others included Oleg Bogaev, the Presnyakov Brothers and Nikolai Kolyada, who was Sigarev and Bogaev’s teacher. Bogaev’s The Russian National Postal Service and the Presnyakovs’ Playing the Victim had significant resonance in England and the United States, but Sigarev arguably eclipsed them all.
Phantom Pains is a terse little play that pushes its characters up against a wall. In a most basic sense, it explores what happens when a young man doesn’t think about his actions. A squeaky-clean, semi-intellectual student unexpectedly finds himself playing the role of abuser and lover all at once. What are the consequences of that, and what of the excruciating psychic pain experienced by the person next to him while he muddles through his small moral battles? As in most of what he writes, Sigarev is merciless in his portrayal of the depths a person can sink to of their own volition.
When Olga Mukhina chose to direct her new play Flying in 2005, eight years had passed since she wrote her previous play YoU. Russia had changed radically. Boris Yeltsin’s creeping wars in the Caucasus, his volatile economic policies and his valiant, if disordered, attempt to bring about democracy and free speech had been replaced by the officially declared optimism and stability of Vladimir Putin’s regime. A new generation of thirty-somethings – the very individuals who might be influenced by the new drama movement – found themselves occupying positions of power, with pockets full of money, and plenty of time on their hands for recreation of the legal and illegal kind.
The early Putin years gave rise to a social stratum that was entirely new to Russia – the young, hip, well-heeled office worker. These weren’t the bosses yet, but they were nothing like the old desk-bound bureaucrats of the Soviet or Tsarist traditions. These were smart, capable, informed, ambitious young people. Their clothes and accessories were western, but bought in Russian boutiques. They might or might not read War and Peace, but they surely read Playboy and Cosmopolitan. In Russian. Flying was the first play to turn a probing eye toward this phenomenon of hip, empowered youth. Not surprisingly it found chinks in the armor and cracks in the facade.
New drama hit something of a wall at mid-decade in the 2000s. New names were not moving in to join the ranks of those who had already made an impact, while some established writers, such as Mikhail Ugarov and Yelena Gremina, quit writing plays. The period from 1998 to 2003 had seen an enormous number of writers establish reputations. By 2005 it seemed as though the well might have gone dry. That two-year lag seems trivial in retrospect; but at the time, it had the feeling of a long, barren journey on a dead-end road. In fact, at that moment a new wave of writers began to appear. The primary source for this was the city of Togliatti, although Minsk, in Belarus, also made a contribution.
Vadim Levanov’s May Readings in Togliatti proved to be one of the most potent sources for new plays outside of Nikolai Kolyada’s Yekaterinburg. The first of the so-called “Togliatti phenomenon” to emerge were two brothers, Vyacheslav and Mikhail Durnenkov. Like the Presnyakov brothers Oleg and Vladimir, the Durnenkovs wrote together. The first of their plays to have an impact was called The Cultural Layer, a story with fantastic elements that explored the various individuals and, therefore, problems that had inhabited a single apartment over a period of decades. Published in 2005, it opened the floodgates for what might be called the second wave of new drama to hit Russian stages. In relatively short succession between 2005 and 2007 important new plays by Yury Klavdiev, Levanov, the Durnenkovs and the highly unique Pavel Pryazhko from Minsk came to light.
Klavdiev’s plays packed a punch of violence and tenderness in a way that was fresh and unexpected. His influences were obvious – Quentin Tarantino, John Ford, Ang Lee and Japanese animé – but his sensibility was purely Russian. He wrote strong women into his plays; and more often than not, teenagers