Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. John Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ At the same time, they come closest to describing the movement they have come to define – much in the way, perhaps, that, for awhile, the term New Russians came to define successful individuals in the 1990s. It must be remembered that new drama was coined specifically both as the title of a festival and as an ideological slogan providing leverage for those whose purpose it was to take a proactive approach to the still-stagnating status of drama in Russian theater in the early 2000s. In other words, the name came first and a manufactured reality followed it. This irritated many who, in the early years especially, saw the movement as more artificial than organic. It also brought about huge potential for change.

      New drama, especially by its enemies in the earlier years, was often considered an offspring of what in Russian in the 1980s and 1990s was called chernukha, or, as I have translated that pithy word elsewhere, gloom, doom, bile and jaundice colored with foul-mouthed insolence. Characters freely used obscenities – something that was still taboo in theaters – and their conduct was anything but model behavior. These plays often looked at the underbelly of society to find meaning.

      The goal among writers was to strip the dramatic text of the perfumes and conceits that had crystallized on its surface over the last 250 years. Famously, Mikhail Ugarov – a founder at both the New Drama Festival and Teatr.doc – railed against metaphors in dramatic writing. Poetry, literature and metaphors were to be swept aside in favor of reality, simplicity, 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.

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