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ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty years, a collection of theatre makers in Russia have staged suppressed and marginalised voices to engage with the political and social realities of contemporary Russia. The work of these innovative theatre practitioners has been collated under the idiom of New Drama (Novaya Drama). Previous studies of New Drama have placed an emphasis on the role of the text and the playwright’s dynamic use of contemporary language. While acknowledging that these are important features of the New Drama repertoire, this article provides an alternative approach by examining the work of Pavel Pryazhko. This article explores Pryazhko’s The Soldier (Soldat, 2011), in the context of the Second Chechen War and Vladimir Putin’s revivification of the military in the public sphere. Through a detailed study of The Soldier in performance, this article contends that the production’s content and form is vital in generating an oppositional discourse about the role of the military in contemporary Russian society. Pryazhko’s eschewal of traditional notions of theatrical language and dialogic interaction in The Soldier disrupts the audience’s expectations of what a theatre performance is, and subsequently facilitates a wider dialogue about the Kremlin’s privileging of the military in Russia.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For example, I am Free (Ya Svoboden, 2012), produced by Volkostrelov’s Post Theatre in St. Petersburg, took the form of the projection of 535 photographs captured by Pryazhko in Minsk, which were accompanied by thirteen captions, sequentially projected every seven seconds to create a complete, unspoken story.
2. A notable exception is John Freedman’s article ‘The Art of Seeing: Dmitry Volkostrelov Interprets Pavel Pryazhko’.
3. As well as attending the production and the post-show discussions that follow it, I also have access to a single camera recording of the piece, as well as a number of transcripts of the post-show debates, kindly shared with me by Teatr.doc’s co-founder Elena Gremina.
4. For more detail of the Royal Court’s involvement in the development of New Drama, see Aston and Thomas (Aston and O’Thomas Citation2015, 77–83, 136–40).
5. It should be noted that New Drama was not always positively received in Russia. It received harsh opprobrium from both theatre-makers and critics for its perceived lack of artistic quality and faced accusations that its association with the Royal Court made it a theatre of foreign influence. Interestingly, this cultural unease surrounding the genealogy of New Drama expressed by some Russian critics is further marshalled with wider debates elsewhere in Europe that articulate pressing concerns about neocolonial performance practices at the start of the twenty-first century. For example, see Nikčević (Nikčević Citation2005).
6. Gremina and Ugarov opened Teatr.doc in central Moscow in 2002; Kazantsev co-founded the Playwright and Director Centre along with Mikhail Roshchin in 1998; Kolyada established a playwriting course at the Yekaterinburg Theatre Institute in 1994 and subsequently opened the Kolyada Theatre in 2001.
7. This point has astutely been made by Duška Radosavljević, who observes that Russian theatre directors have a much less text-centered approach to theatre making in general than, for example, their associates in the United Kingdom or the United States (Radosavljević Citation2013, 53).
8. Mat was a phenomenon that appeared in Russian literature during Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika in the 1980s as a means of challenging and subverting the linguistic constraints of official Soviet discourse. It is defined by Russian literary scholar Eliot Borenstein as ‘forbidden words describing the human anatomy, sexual activity, and the rest of the physiological functions’ (Borenstein Citation2008, 58).
9. I use John Freedman’s translation of Pryazhko’s lines as included in Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Drama (Freedman Citation2014a, 110).
10. Unless otherwise noted, translations in this paper are my own.
11. In his article on Pryazhko and Volkostrelov’s theatre, Freedman describes how ‘two years after seeing The Soldier […] I debate questions the director raised but did not answer’ (Freedman Citation2014b, 53).
12. I am grateful to Elena Gremina for sharing with me a number of recordings of the post-show discussions staged at Teatr.doc.
13. Eichler’s comments are echoed by Laura Prividera and John Howard, who note that ‘the continued ideological essentializing of soldiers as “masculine men” calls into question the very legitimacy of the female soldier.’ (Prividera and Howard III Citation2006, 30).
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Notes on contributors
James Rowson
James Rowson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex. He received his PhD from the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. His primary research investigates new theatre writing in Russia since 2000, in the context of the political, social and cultural background of the Putin era. James is also a member of the ESRC funded project ‘Freelancers in the Dark’, a study that explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on freelance theatre-makers in the United Kingdom. He is an editorial assistant for Contemporary Theatre Review and was previously editor of the peer-reviewed journal Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts.