International playwrights' season, London

Thu Mar 7 11:08:26 UTC 2002

I saw this on JRL. It may be interesting for Londoners
on the list.
Charles
==================
International Playwrights Season, Royal Court, London
SW1 (020-7565
5100).
`Steps to Siberia' to Sat. `Plasticine' opens 15 Mar

#10
The Independent (UK)
6 March 2002
Russia's new revolution Russian theatre is finally
addressing modern
concerns - thanks, in part, to the Royal Court. Paul
Taylor went to see
how
a London theatre helped Moscow's dramatists to find a
voice
BY PAUL TAYLOR

In one of the oldest parts of Moscow, to the east of
Red Square,
there's a
stocky white building called the English Court. It was
restored in
honour
of the Queen's state visit to Russia in 1994 and it
boasts (if that's
the
right word) a framed photograph of Her Majesty signing
the visitors'
book.
Ivan the Terrible, who had unavailing marital designs
on Elizabeth I,
donated the house as a kind of embassy for the English
traders who
began
commerce with Russia in 1553.

A fortnight ago, I visited this place in the company
of a young Moscow
dramatist, Alexander Rodionov, and confronted by one
of the rooms, we
both
burst out laughing. In opposite corners, there's an
exhibition of
relics
and facsimiles of the wares that the two countries
initially exchanged.
Sixteenth-century England does not come out of this
comparison smelling
of
roses. In the Russian corner, the items are all
pacific and nurturing
(honey, furs, rope, caviar and mica) while the English
corner is a
sheer
blast of belligerence, bristling with muskets, pikes
and gunpowder.

My Moscow trip comes as a direct result of a recent,
more constructive
British intervention in Russian cultural life. We in
England are just
about
to reap the rewards, in the shape of a showcase at the
Royal Court of
the
highly impressive work that has emerged from the
interchange. The
season is
to include a full promenade production(with an English
director and
cast)
of Plasticine, a clear-eyed and bitterly comic look at
provincial life
in
Russia today from the hot young playwright Vassily
Sigarev, and
verbatim-project pieces from two fresh Siberian
companies, which will
plunge us into the experiences of workers in a mining
commune, into the
revealing correspondence between Russian conscripts
sent to Chechnya
and
their mothers and lovers back home, and into the lives
of a poverty-
stricken fishing community adrift on an ice floe.

As I learn quickly, Moscow is on the move in many
senses. Even the
street
names are refusing to stay put. My first meeting is
scheduled to take
place
at a trendy new night-spot called Klon (aka Clone).
But the British
Council's Russian driver drops me off outside a
different establishment
altogether, where there's a panic-inducing paucity of
people who can
understand a word I utter. I've been in a mad rush
because of a flight
delay, so I am without roubles or a map (or any
Russian), and the one
girl
who speaks a tiny amount of English denies that this
is even the street
I'm
expecting (Pushkinskaya) and directs me to a parallel
road.

I find out later that she both is and isn't right. The
names of the
streets
in the area are in the process of changing and
migrating. It's only
because
Oskolkova, the drama and dance manager at the British
Council in
Moscow,
has asked for a description of me that I'm not still
lost. She hails me
from another door and introduces me to Elena Gremina
and Mikhail
Ugarov,
who run the pioneering new-writing project. The
following night, this
pair
are going to launch a venue that would have been
inconceivable a couple
of
years ago: a centre for contemporary playwriting,
right in the centre
of
the city, called Theatr.doc.

Klon is achingly hip and minimalist. Tatyana notices
me frowning in
puzzlement at the www.youneverknow.ru logo etched out
in large, stone
letters over the dining area. Having spent her life in
international
relations, Tatyana has a broad, humane culture and
learned wit. She
teases
me that the logo is an allusion to the French fashion
designer Chanel,
who
even slept in full make-up on the grounds that "you
never know" when
you
will meet your man and so should always look your
best. I relax and
think
to myself: I'm going to enjoy this trip.

It's enjoyable and inspiring to meet a gifted
generation of new
twentysomething playwrights, whose sense of their own
creativity was
legitimised by an intervention from a happy hook-up
between the British
Council and the Royal Court's international
department. In 1999,
Plasticine's fine translator, Sasha Dugdale, then the
council's
cultural
chief in Moscow, invited the Royal Court to take part
in a seminar
about
new writing, which included translated excerpts from
the work of Sarah
Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber. The turmoil
of post-Communist
experience has not been reflected on the stages of
Moscow's 200-plus
theatres. During my own recent visit, there were 16
productions of
Chekhov's The Seagull to choose from and only 10 new
plays. So, at that
packed seminar, the effect was electrifying when the
Court's literary
manager, Graham Whybrow, delivered a speech about the
principles and
vision
of a theatre that puts the living writer at the centre
of his practice.

Everyone you speak to in Moscow theatre says that talk
caused a
revolution.
The stranglehold of officialdom had been such that
Russian dramatists
who
held similar views had kept them bottled up. The cork
was now drawn,
and
the response, said one of my interviewees, bordered on
"the
irrational".
Russian dramatists began to talk to one another, and
then, as a result
of
follow-up work by the Court, they began to talk to the
people on the
streets. Elyse Dodgson, the head of the international
department, went
out
to hold workshops on verbatim theatre - on how to
gather and shape
personal
testimony to create drama of intense immediacy.
Stephen Daldry flew
over
and spearheaded a piece that drew on conversations
with the homeless
who
doss down in Moscow's railway stations. It resulted in
a wave of
monologues, collectively entitled Moscow: Open City,
which became the
rage
of the metropolitan nightclubs, a cross between
stand-up, drama and
personal witness.

And now I'm on my way to Gorky Leninskiye, Lenin's
country retreat.
Inside,
a gigantic white effigy of him still looks down from
the top of a
sweeping
red-carpeted staircase. This place used to be a mecca
for tourists, but
it
is now in the throes of a creative-identity crisis.
Before Lenin, it
was
the home of a hero of Borodino and of the merchant
Morozov, who,
strangely,
gave money to both Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre
and the
Bolsheviks.
Post-Communism, who would have thought it would ever
become the
workshop
for a new-writing project? It's comparable to
rehearsing Brecht in
Hitler's
bunker. Yet for 10 excited, sleepless days last
autumn, that is
precisely
what it was turned into, again through the input of
the British
Council. My
guides are the young playwright Sergei Kaluzhanov, the
theatre director
Alexander Vartanov and the museum's deputy director,
Alexandra
Kalyakina.

They tell me of how they did a piece on the museum's
attendants, people
who
have worked there for more than 30 years, and on the
myths about the
place
that they have stoutly cherished. They relate how
Maxim Kurochkin,
regarded
by many as the most talented of the new wave of
dramatists, had so
internalised the testimony of the vagrants he had
worked with that he
performed without a script, taking questions from the
audience and
answering in character. It's not just writers who
benefit from
verbatim.
The process releases actors, too, from the prison of a
literary
tradition
that has left them unused to evoking the contemporary
on stage.

A whirlwind tour one day with Vassily Chernov, a young
theatre
producer,
makes me feel that every place where we alight has
potential for drama:
whether it's the new Bagration Bridge - a
river-spanning megalopolis of
shops and banks; or the Park of Sculptures, a
fascinating knacker's
yard of
discredited iconic monuments; or the poverty-stricken
apartment in the
centre of the city where an old lady occupies half a
former baronial
ballroom, but has no toilet or bathing facilities.

The opening festivities at Theatr.doc are
high-spirited and
low-maintenance. The venue, with its studio-sized
performance space, is
still a bit of a building site and, to symbolise the
abrasive intent of
the
project, the writers, directors, and friends and
supporters are each
given
a square of black emery paper to nail to the walls.
There are tributes
to
and from the Royal Court, and future verbatim schemes
are outlined -
one
involves asking Russia's elderly folk, who have gone
through violent
vicissitudes in the past century, what ambitions they
have for the rest
of
their lives. I have read the work they have done in
translation, and
the
quality is extraordinarily high. I tease some of the
playwrights that
the
time will come when there's no community left to
explore. I also
suggest,
fancifully at first, that they should do a verbatim
piece about the
dramatists of the immediately preceding generation,
whom history dealt
a
dud hand. Too late to be of the Alexander Gelman
anti-Soviet-corruption
school, and too early to take full flight with this
new generation, to
which some of them react, apparently, with
understandable jealousy.

Then it occurs to me that this might not be a bad
idea: the young
making a
real imaginative effort to understand their immediate
forebears, as
Russian
new-writing theatre moves forward into what looks set
to be an exciting
future.

International Playwrights Season, Royal Court, London
SW1 (020-7565
5100).
`Steps to Siberia' to Sat. `Plasticine' opens 15 Mar

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