War in Everyday Life in Russia

The play before you was originally titled "The War Has Not Yet Started." Written in 2014, it refers starkly to the covert war that Russia waged on Ukrainian territories, leading to the annexation of Crimea. Mikhail Durnenkov, its writer, was by then an award-winning playwright based in Moscow, but he was addressing an international audience—staging the play on Russian soil seemed impossible at the time. The systematic censorship and persecution of anti-war speech quickly reached the theatre world with the imprisonment of the Ukrainian director and playwright Oleg Sentsov in May 2014. As of this writing, Sentsov is internationally recognized as a political prisoner and is on indefinite hunger strike. Durnenkov's original Russian text of the play premiered only recently in June 2018, a low-budget production at the tiny Praktika Theatre in Moscow. The play reaches beyond Russia's latest territorial aggression, exploring everyday violence in Russian life.

Whereas Western critics, scholars, and donors view the label of "political theatre" positively, Russian audiences and artists generally resist labeling most kinds of theatre "political" as it smacks of socialist realist indoctrination and agit-prop. Playwrights like Mikhail Durnenkov write socially engaged dramas, but they are less interested in overt messaging; instead, they want to connect political violence to everyday exploitation and seek aesthetic forms equal to the task. These writers have been grouped under the umbrella term New Drama (Novaia drama), which stems from the New Drama Festival and post-Soviet Russia's first political theatre, Teatr.doc, both founded in 2002.

In 1999, the UK-based Royal Court Theatre ran several workshops with the would-be Teatr.doc artists, providing the initial inspiration for this genre and lending it legitimacy. The workshops trained young Russian playwrights in gathering verbatim interviews and other primary source materials for documentary theatre, but they could hardly have predicted the genre's popularity. Documentary drama spread to the remotest cities and towns, inspired, aided, and promoted by Elena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov, the founders of the Moscow-based Teatr.doc. The playwrights for whom Gremina and Ugarov tirelessly advocated managed to transform Russian theatre. They brought contemporary life and language onto the stage, engaging with social taboos and urgent social problems. They attracted new audiences because they were themselves outsiders to the theatre world, and were interested in marginal communities and diverse subcultures.

Playwrights hailing from Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, and other provincial centers likewise enlivened and inspired a Moscow-dominated theatre scene. Mikhail Durnenkov was one among them. Born in Siberia in 1976, he grew up in Togliatti, a provincial city that has been called the Russian Detroit. He started writing plays while working as an automotive engineer, participating in an amateur theatre circle along with his brother Viacheslav Durnenkov, and Iurii Kavdiev and Vadim Levanov. Several of Durnenkov's plays have been translated and/or staged in English, including The Cultural Layer (2005) and The Drunks (2009), co-written with his brother, and Trash (published in John Freedman's recent Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Drama). Durnenkov's plays have likewise appeared in French, Turkish, Spanish, and other languages—international success that was far from guaranteed by his modest background.

Perhaps because so many New Drama artists are outsiders, they have thematized home and its loss, evoking comparisons to Chekhov. New Drama's marginalized protagonists, in general, recall the classics, the "superfluous man" of nineteenth-century Russian literature and his cousin, the Soviet-era loafer or non-conformist. However, they are much more interested in subcultural identity. What New Drama adds is a hyper-awareness of diversity, identity, and especially of sexual and gender-based violence. All of these themes are present in small and large ways in this play.

To Western readers, Russian "New Drama" will recall the hyper-naturalism of In-Yer-Face theatre, the British New Wave, and Dogma 95, but it is also influenced by artistic movements closer to home. In Klavdiev's plays or in those of the Presniakov brothers we can see the fantasy and horror of 1980s literary chernukha (literally "filth"). Liudmila Petrushevskaya and Vladimir Sorokin are perhaps...