Molded Men: Vassily Sigarev's Plasticine

Figure 1.

Vassily Sigarev's Plasticine at the Bonn Biennale, 2002. Photo: M. Gutermann

Plasticine, a claylike sculpting material used by children, can be shaped and molded into desired forms, but it retains malleable properties. Though a solid, plasticine stays both pliant and impressionable. Vassily Sigarev's troubled young protagonists mold and recast plasticine for playful and malicious purposes, and the author named his first play after the formative material because his characters share its qualities. Like plasticine, Maksim and Lyokha adapt to their environment, bend with pressure, and continually form, un-form, and re-form. Neither the substance nor Sigarev's characters are completely elastic, however, and neither can avoid a certain amount of hardening over time.

At the play's opening, a young man works plasticine into a bowl as it smokes and then cracks under heat. In the next scene, the boy is dead; neighbors tell his friends that he came apart like the container. Maksim, a young man similarly trapped in a harsh nightmare of adolescence, also finds himself drawn to sculpting. With window shades drawn, he models crude figures of women and men—extensions of his own confused sexuality. Plasticine offers Maksim a means of self-expression and self-formation. A few scenes later, he uses the clay to hatch a mischievous plan to embarrass a despised teacher in the men's room. (Toward that purpose, he shapes a grotesque phallus.) By the end, after suffering violent sexual abuse and psychological torture, Maksim again retreats to his sculpting table, this time to mold a self-portrait. A drop of his blood falls onto the figurine's forehead, baptizing it into life. Eventually, when he can no longer suppress his rage, Maksim constructs a knuckle-duster using plasticine, alabaster, and molten lead; mirroring the first scene, smoke fills the room, and the choking boy can barely fulfill his vengeful project. When his plan succeeds, Maksim's shell finally breaks; he has hardened into an adult too brittle to survive.

Sigarev's young protagonists are susceptible to touch and molded by the forces around them. Adults and teachers treat them with insensitivity at best, and more often with outright hostility. Romantic dalliances turn gruesome and perverse. The young are mistreated, ignored, and berated; falling further and further into trouble, they are also beaten violently and raped. Adolescence is not a period of discovery or self-knowledge, as it might be in a traditional American play; here growing up means confronting the ubiquitous brutality doled out by a society in which living is a form of suffering. Time runs short: youth hardens rapidly into an embittered, soulless form no longer adaptable, destined to crack.

Born in 1977 in the Lower Tagil region of the Urals, Sigarev continues to work and live in a provincial city so remote that he remains largely inaccessible to outsiders. Plasticine, his first play, was written in 2000, when he was only twenty-three, and was presented at a festival of new writing in Lyubimovka later that year. After winning the Anti-Booker Prize in the United Kingdom, Plasticine received a full staging in Moscow in the spring of 2001, and it was translated and subsequently mounted at the Royal Court Theatre in London in Dominic Cooke's production in March 2002.

Sigarev's other plays chronicle the social and psychological cruelties befalling his country. In Black Milk, which received a translation and workshop at the Royal Court in 2002, two "New Russians"—in this case, slick-talking con artists from Moscow—arrive at a provincial village's train station hawking wares of dubious authenticity and value. Their distrustful commercial and psychological transactions with the townsfolk presage a violent departure, as traditional and invented moralities confront one another over useless appliances.

In their episodic form, social panoramas, and themes of psychological awakening, Sigarev's plays echo Wedekind's Spring Awakening and Büchner's Woyzeck, which also share themes of provincial suffering. Plasticine consists of thirty-three short scenes, each numbered with no further distinction. Each component of social decay carries equal weight...