Attention! During the performance there is smoking*, profanity is used.
Asia Voloshina, one of the most prominent playwrights of today's young Russian generation, is being presented for the first time in Lithuania. Her play The Fish Man was written in 2016. and included in the debut collection of plays Miršta choras. Four plays about Russia (2018). The premiere of the play took place at the Moscow Art Theater (MCHAT) in 2018. The performance of director Yuriy Butusov became one of the events of the Russian theater season. Today, A. Voloshina's plays are staged in major theaters in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities, and are translated into foreign languages.
I don't want to talk about one case, I want to talk about the death of Russia and metaphysical things, the strangest hypotheses and possibilities. I want to talk about destruction and how long it can go on. - this is how playwright Asia Vološina describes her work. In her plays, modern Russian realities intertwine with pre-revolutionary historical memory, and the characters' speech contains allusions to the work of Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky... A. Voloshina stands out from other Russian writers of her age both by the intonation of the texts, which are exposed to the extreme, and by the cultural baggage reflected in her work. Its heroes are idealists who feel like strangers in their homeland. They are frantically searching for themselves between the non-existent past and the unbearable present. They seek to find a connection with their homeland, with another person, but they remain alone with memories of a lost paradise, like that snow on Karvannaya Street, which came from the work of Mikhail Bulgakov...
The director of the play, Eglė Švedkauskaitė: "Fish Man" is a linguistic labyrinth, a network of confessions emerging at night, spoken by women's lips and heard by men's ears. This is a rare case in dramaturgy. Presenting Asia Vološina's play for me means inviting the viewer to a stretched time, in the frame of which anxiety spreads. For yourself, for your body, for your child, for the country and the future. This is an opportunity to delve into the concept of freedom - what is it in a non-democratic environment? My defiance or non-resistance? Isn't appeasement and cynicism directed at a decaying order a form of self-imprisonment? And dependence on illusions and unfulfilled desires, helplessness, reluctance to take action and waiting for hope - all this is also a shackle to freedom, perhaps even tighter than the one imposed on a person by systems and ideologies. Reality (and the state) in this play is oppressive, it comes into the house, which the play's characters naively consider a sufficiently strong barricade, and takes what it wants. But if you shut yourself off from everyday life in your apartment, aren't you doing a service to the system itself? You back off. Realizing the absurdity of his standing at the rally, he rushes to the safe world of quotes and dreams at home. In the face of uncontrollable aggression promoted by today's Russia, it is audacious to ask such a question, but "Fishman" allows us to consider: what is the point of going to the squares when you know the script of an ordinary picket by heart? If your instincts grow louder and louder that you are dealing with a dead country whose body has been cold since before you were born?
*using herbal cigarettes without tobacco and nicotine.
