During the young playwrights' festival, Teatr.doc comes apart at the seams with nerves and delight — and the best of these readings can be watched from anywhere.
During Lyubimovka, the young playwrights' festival, Teatr.doc comes apart at the seams with nerves and delight; an enormous amount happens there. I wasn't there myself, and even on the recordings you can feel that unreal atmosphere of making something together.
Texts of every quality get sent in, and it's always absorbing to go into somebody's world through them, however polished or naive the form. If you're in another city, follow the festival's YouTube channel, where every reading goes up along with the discussions, the lectures and the masterclasses — even a viewer with no particular grounding in theatre will find something.
Partly for pleasure and partly out of professional necessity I watch readings regularly, and somehow always miss the ones happening live in St. Petersburg. From now on I'll post where and when, so you can get into playwriting too — you might even write something yourself, which isn't against the law yet.
Today's pick is obvious and near the surface, no discoveries here: Valery Pecheykin, whom you'll know from the talks he gives before every show on the main stage of the Gogol Center, where more than one of his plays has been staged.
"Philosophers," as far as I know, never became a full production — possibly because this reading worked so well. Funny and tragic, uncompromising and surreal.
Elia Suleiman made a film whose hero changes almost nothing — which is exactly what leaves you alone with your own conclusions.
Not a recommendation but an attempt to think it through — written straight after the run at the Lensoviet Theatre.
How "Robot Kostya" came about — Russia's first robotic theatre production, where it turned out Chekhovian passions were within a robot's range after all.
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