DRUNKS 16

A festival director, a prostitute, a manager – participants in a bachelor party. A peculiar twist of fate brings these odd characters together in Drunks. They speak about God, love, freedom, and the search for themselves, also stuttering, haltingly. For the most part, they are trying to put into words the anxiety that in our empty, seemingly rational world honesty may well have no real place and it may be quite impossible to find real love.

Drunks enquires about the most fundamental issues of European civilization and contemporary life, about a lifestyle that we have been deceived into seeing as rational, tolerant, and sober but which, in fact, hides the loss of love, faith, and culture and conceals deceitful ideologies. Only a few “drunk and honest” figures can speak about all this, painfully and with distorted minds, as if making an apocryphal confession.

The author, Ivan Vyrypaev was born in Irkutsk in 1974. He is a cult figure in contemporary Russian theatrical life, a dramatist and director, and a central figure of the New Drama movement. Together with Viktor Ryzhakov, Vyrypaev has launched an art group, “Oxygen” (Kislorod), which endeavours to create a new theatrical language with a fresh tone and mentality. Ryzhakov’s directing is characterized by this new, unusual, original theatrical language.