Witness onstage

Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia

Molly Flynn

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526126214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

As the Kremlin's crackdown on freedom of expression continues to tighten, Russian playwrights and directors are using documentary theatre to create space for the public discussion of injustice in the civic sphere and its connections to the country's twentieth-century past. Witness Onstage traces the history of documentary theatre's rapid growth in twenty-first century Russia and situates the form within the socio-political setting of the Putin years. It argues that through the practice of performing documents, Russian theatre artists are creating a new type of cultural and historical archive that challenges the dominance of state-sponsored media and invites individuals to participate in a collective renegotiation of cultural narratives.

1
Called to the stand

The origins of Russian documentary theatre

The emergence of New Drama in the 1990s and the development of documentary theatre methods in the early 2000s marked a vital shift in the development of Russian dramatic practice. It was, in part, the rapid changes to all spheres of cultural production following the dissolution of the Soviet Union that created the space for a new mode of theatre making. However, while the appearance of verbatim playwriting and the advent of New Drama at the end of the twentieth-century is often thought of as a total departure from Russia's dramatic past, this chapter explains how the development of Russian documentary theatre along with its related genre, New Drama, were both rooted in Russian and international theatre history.

Beginning with an overview of New Russian Drama primarily as a literary genre, Chapter 1 describes how documentary theatre came to the forefront of the theatrical avant-garde in Russia during the Putin years. After setting the scene for the founding of Teatr.doc in 2002, the chapter looks to certain twentieth-century performance practices both in Russia and abroad in an effort to parse particular threads of influence integral to Russia's twenty-first-century documentary theatre practice. By weaving between key moments in Russia's twentieth-century theatre history and important developments in the realm of documentary theatre internationally, this chapter places twenty-first-century Russian documentary theatre within its artistic and historic context and narrates the form's two interdependent origin stories.

We don't have contemporary drama

The years directly following perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union were, for Russian theatre, as for the rest of the region, a time of transition. ‘The old theatre had died’ writes historian A.V. Vislova, ‘but the new theatre had not yet appeared’ (2009: 11). Critics and artists have since recalled that Russian theatre in the early 1990s was often mistakenly characterized as completely lacking in new writing. In retrospect, crucial developments in contemporary drama are apparent throughout this so-called ‘time of decay’ (2009:11); however, the lack of publication options for playwrights, in conjunction with a dearth of directors and theatres willing to stage the new works, gave way to what John Freedman has called ‘the myth of the collapse of modern dramatic writing’ (1997: xiv). Many late-Soviet playwrights never overcame the obstacles to becoming post-Soviet playwrights. Those who did successfully navigate the transition, such as Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Vladimir Sorokin, gained the freedom to print their previously unpublishable work, often turning their attention away from the stage and more exclusively to novels, stories, and film.

As Beumers and Lipovetsky describe in detail in Performing Violence, the origins of New Russian Drama can be traced directly to the efforts of a select group of playwrights and teachers who, precisely during this transitional time, initiated events to support new theatre-making with the direct intention of developing a community of young post-Soviet playwrights. Nikolai Koliada's work at the Ekaterinburg Theatre Institute beginning in 1994 was an invaluable influence, as was his Eurasia Playwriting Competition which began in 2003. In 1998 Alexei Kazantsev and Mikhail Roshchin founded their Centre for Playwriting and Directing (Tsentr dramaturgii i rezhissury) in Moscow, a venue created for the explicit purpose of promoting new playwriting. In 1999 Vadim Levanov founded the May Readings in Togliatti thereby forming another hub of new playwriting which cultivated the early careers of renowned writers like Mikhail and Viacheslav Durnenkov as well as Iurii Klavdiev. In 2002, Eduard Boiakov launched the New Drama festival at the Moscow Art Theatre, an initiative that began as part of the Golden Mask Festival and continued to run in various venues and under different leadership until 2008.

Perhaps most influential was the revival of the Liubimovka New Playwriting Festival in 1990 by playwrights Elena Gremina, Alexei Kazantsev, Mikhail Roshchin, Viktor Slavkin, and Mikhail Ugarov. The Liubimovka New Playwriting Festival has since become one of the most important annual events for both new and not-so-new Russian language playwrights. The festival is named after Konstantin Stanislavsky's summer estate, thus recalling the event's twentieth-century roots. During the early years of Stanislavsky's and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's work at the Moscow Art Theatre, writers, actors, and directors gathered annually at Liubimovka, not far from Moscow, to share and discuss their most recent works. The Liubimovka Festival, held in recent years each September at Teatr.doc, retains not only its original name but also its purpose as a space for discovery and innovation in Russian theatre research.

Figure 3: The audience at the Liubimovka New Playwriting Festival (2016)

With these support structures in place, Russia's first generation of post-Soviet theatre artists began to write and produce plays that portrayed the instability they experienced in their everyday lives. The plays of this period varied in style and content but were unified in their efforts to explore and expose the paradoxes of the post-Soviet experience. The immediacy and intimacy of theatre as an artistic medium made it an ideal genre in which writers could portray the new sociopolitical culture. It was also during these years that staged readings became particularly popular in Russia as a way for authors to share their play texts with audiences even before a full production could be mounted. Playwrights like those mentioned above, together with Maksym Kurochkin, Nina Sadur, Vasilii Sigarev, and Oleg and Vladimir Presniakov, were among those who led a generation of both artists and audiences into nuanced investigation of the shifting cultural environment in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Among the first new Russian playwrights to break out of the relative anonymity of the nation's festival circuit and onto the Moscow mainstage was Olga Mukhina with her play Tania-Tania, which premiered at the Fomenko theatre in 1996. An exuberant narrative of friends who fall in and out of love with one another, Mukhina's play is credited by Freedman with breathing new life into Moscow's theatre scene (1998: xi). The text includes no reference to the political crises that dominated the social sphere outside the theatre at that time and yet, as Freedman argues, it was precisely its seeming lack of political engagement that made Tania-Tania as socially relevant as it was. By focusing exclusively on the individual subjective experiences of her characters, Mukhina's play testified to the fact that life and love continued even in the midst of Russia's unruly 1990s. Mukhina and her New Dramatist colleagues rejected the Soviet notion that theatre and art ought to reflect life exclusively ‘as it should be’, and rather aimed to portray life as it was. Though the plays of this period could not be broadly categorized as ‘realist’ per se, they shared a common trait in their use of quotidian language in performance as an important medium through which to interpret and reflect the sociocultural circumstances of their time.

Another influential work from the early days of New Russian Drama was Oleg Bogaev's play Russkaia narodnaia pochta (Russian National Post, 1997). An implicitly political satire, Russian National Post depicts an aging pensioner who spends his days alone in his room of a communal apartment writing letters to old friends and historical figures including Lenin, Stalin, and the celebrated Red Army commander Vasilii Ivanovich Chapaev. As it happens, the elderly Ivan Sidorovich also receives letters from his correspondents, or rather discovers letters that he has written himself and hidden away only moments before he finds them. As the play continues, the interlocutors of Sidorovich's imagination (including the Queen of England) begin to appear onstage and the audience learns that they have each been promised his room in the communal flat after the occupant's death. As the figures of Soviet dictatorship go head to head with Elizabeth II on the issue of who will be the heir to Sidorovich's meagre belongings, the audience is confronted with the lack of support for pensioners amid Russia's looming financial crisis. Moreover, the play captures the complexities of how numerous generations raised on Soviet propaganda were, after perestroika, confronted with seemingly sudden and undeniably extreme shifts in cultural values and societal structures. Russian National Post premiered with a reading at Liubimovka in 1997 and was awarded the Anti-Booker prize in the drama category in the following year. In 1998 the play was given a full production at the Tabakov Theatre Studio in Moscow, directed by the Lithuanian-Russian director Kama Ginkas, with the studio's namesake Oleg Tabakov in the leading role.

By the late 1990s, Mukhina, Bogaev, and their New Dramatist colleagues had revolutionized Russian theatre. They re-established the theatre as an important place for the discussion and representation of cultural narratives in contemporary Russian culture. Additionally, they appropriated everyday language set within the context of theatrical performance in an effort to understand and interpret the world around them. As Susanna Weygandt aptly articulates, the ‘hollow’ heroes of New Russian Drama represented a departure from their Soviet predecessors (2016: 118). Whereas Soviet trends dictated that plays celebrate the (primarily virtuous) deeds of dramatic heroes, many of the characters in New Russian Drama were riddled with inaction, indecision, and a lack of engagement with the world around them. In this way, the dominance of Russia's state theatres was tested by the emergence of small studios created for the explicit purpose of experimentation. Alternative theatre collectives across the country were, at this time, gaining notoriety for productions that challenged the theatre status quo in both form and content.

As described by theatre critic Elena Kovalskaia, the ‘fourth wall’ in Russian theatre collapsed at approximately the same time as the Berlin Wall.¹ Of course, the fourth wall had been dismantled many times in Russian theatre history before 1989; however, what Kovalskaia refers to is a notable and significant shift away from psychological realism towards the end of the Soviet Union and a marked increase in formal experimentation throughout the 1990s. In other words, extreme changes to all phases of the social sphere were, unsurprisingly, reflected in Russia's post-perestroika theatre practice. Though the new drama of the 1990s may have been slow to gain recognition amongst the country's most renowned theatre institutions, it is clear that the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union was in fact an exceptionally generative time for new playwriting in Russia. Through the support of new drama festivals and the emergence of journals dedicated to the publication of new plays, Russia's first generation of post-perestroika playwrights transformed modern Russian drama and paved the way for further dramatic experimentation in the 2000s. As critic Daniil Dondurei observed in 2006,

‘New Drama’ is a major source of hope for our culture. Specifically ‘new drama’ and not new Russian theatre. That is to say drama as texts, as new kinds of meaning, a new philosophy, a new understanding of freedom, and as a path to an alternative understanding of morality.²

Dondurei's notion that New Drama offered a path to an ‘alternative understanding of morality’ is a testament to the performative nature of dramatic writing in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His statement explicitly emphasizes the role of text and the playwright's use of language as the leading forces behind this cultural and creative movement.

New Russian Drama, according to Beumers and Lipovetsky, ‘undoubtedly represents the most distinct reaction to the identity crisis that characterizes the post-Soviet era’ (2009: 34). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, notions of both personal and national identity came into question. New Drama arose as a creative practice through which artists and audiences could express and explore ‘such diverse phenomena as the reassessment of history and the intensive production of historical myths, the increase of social apathy and a growing religiousness, nostalgia for the great empire and xenophobia’ (Beumers and Lipovetsky, 2009: 34).

It was also during these years that many Russian theatre artists developed an interest in the work of British playwrights like Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill who were, at that time, gaining international recognition as the leaders of ‘In-Yer-Face-Theatre’, a genre of dramatic writing known for using violence, vulgarity, and confrontation to shock its audiences into direct engagement with the work and its subject matter (see Sierz, 2001). In the 1990s British playwrights were also leading the world stage in political and documentary theatre innovation, as the verbatim plays of the Royal Court and the tribunal plays at London's Tricycle Theatre were developing new ways to work with factual material onstage. It was in this capacity that the first representative from the Royal Court was invited to Moscow to give a public lecture in February 1999.

Graham Whybrow, the Royal Court's literary director, was commissioned to deliver a talk on the primacy of the playwright in the creative process of new drama in the UK. In his Moscow lecture, Whybrow informed his audience of primarily Russian theatre professionals that, in British new drama, the playwright is an essential part in the full rehearsal and production process of new plays. For Russian theatre artists the suggestion that a playwright could play as significant a role as the director in the creative process was a controversial notion. As Yana Ross describes in her article on the development of New Russian Drama, the country's theatre history is internationally renowned for its di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• 1 Called to the stand
• 2 History on trial
• 3 Evidentiary hearing
• 4 Material witness
• 5 Burden of proof
• 6 A special verdict
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index