INVESTIGATION OF HORROR

This production is based on the audio recording of Leonid Lipavskoi’s conversation with the members of the Russian avant-garde literary group called OBERIU (an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art) that took place in his flat in St. Petersburg in the mid-1930s. Director Boris Pavlovich came up with the idea to stage these texts in a former St. Petersburg communal flat. The setting itself blurs the separation between the ‘stage’ and the ‘auditorium’. Sitting with us in the kitchen or in the living room, members of the OBERIU group, including outstanding poets Kharms, Zabolotsky, Vvedensky and Oleynikov, discuss all sorts of things – God, milk, tram drivers, the immortality of the soul…they  seem to be our intimate partners in the conversation. Yet the principal characters of this theatrical action are not the poets but the time they lived in, the food they ate, their feelings, their quarrels - it all seems to become real. It is not that the people generate thoughts, but rather the thoughts gain flesh and blood; the ideas as such become subjects of the action. It seems that if you reach out a hand you can touch them. The conversations resemble Plato's dialogues and, according to Pavlovich, each character can be performed by any actor no matter what age or gender: after all, ideas and thoughts have neither gender nor age. Watching relationships between characters is getting boring – it is much more interesting to observe ideas fleshing out. That’s probably why Boris Pavlovich’s performance was for me one of the most important theatrical events in recent years. 

With support from the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation