Articles

“For the last seven years, before the war, I made socially engaged art in Russia. We built utopias, an alternative space of freedom and equality in conditions of Putin’s thickening authoritarianism. The war showed that art won’t stop people who have access to the red button. The experience of Yellowcake allowed me to understand that there are too few utopias today. Art has the power and instruments to become a real facilitator between civil society and powerful institutions in the battle for a fairer future. As a minimum, it can give the experience of revealing oneself as an actor in history, and the desire to make that experience last.” 

In 2014, the state-run journal, Kultura, named 20 plays which it very embodiment of ‘sleaze, obscenities, pornography, and worthless shamanism disguised as innovation’. In other words, it was a blatant attack on cultural innovators, playwrights, artists who dissent from the dominant state ideology. The play which heads the list as the most offensive play is […]

By Noah Birksted-Breen. This article was originally published on the Creative Multilingualism website. I have just finished translating Mikhail Durnenkov’s The War Hasn’t Yet Started for the third time in as many years. I’m in an unusual situation – one translator creating three different versions of the same play. As far as I know, that […]

An interview about the project at Theatre 503 – original article by going to this link. Reproduced (unformatted) below. Theatre louder than politics Is it Getting Cold in Here…?, a selection of plays on contemporary Russia, currently runs at Theatre503. The Kompass spoke to Nina Belenitskaya and Evgeny Kazachkov, the two Russian playwrights part of […]

“The Sputnik Theatre Company also offers a glimmer of hope. If the taste for Russian theatre in Britain is going to get out of its 19th-century rut, it may well start here.” To read the full article – click here.