Playwrights were offered to create plays about the Great Patriotic War and the Northern Military District

Director Alexander Galibin: “The accumulating energy will result in a creative breakthrough”

The special operation radically changed the landscape of Russian drama and theater. There is a demand for these changes in society, and you can be sure that they are really happening by looking at the short list of one of the literary competitions.

The other day, on January 26, a meeting of the jury of the contemporary Russian-language drama competition “Characters” took place at the Moscow Theater on Trubnaya. Experts, including artistic director of the theater Dmitry Astrakhan, head of the Radio Theater studio Marina Bagdasaryan, lawyer and playwright Mikhail Barshchevsky, general director of the Guild of Playwrights of the Russian Federation Yuri Batunin, actor and director Alexander Galibin, screenwriter Elena Isaeva and others, determined the shortlist of the project.

Eight plays were selected from three hundred works by authors from twenty countries. Let’s list their authors here – it is possible that we are pronouncing out loud the names of the future stars of Russian drama: Alexander Tyuzhin, Anna Geyzhan, Valery Tugolukov, Alexandra Fomina, Elena Trofimchuk, Denis Orlov and Oleg Maslov. At the same time, Mikhail Romanenko’s play “My Grandmother Smokes a Pipe” was noted by the jury of the Russian State Library of Arts.

“I have been involved in modern drama for many years – starting with the so-called new wave, new drama, which came to us in the early 90s and brought Mikhail Ugarov, Elena Gremina, Alexey Shipenko, Maxim Kurochkin. I have also been involved in the “Characters” competition for a long time. And it seems to me that the explosion that happened then doesn’t exist now,” admits Alexander Galibin. But he assures that “a certain platform has appeared on which the authors have gathered,” although they cannot yet take the “decisive step.”

“This is not stagnation, this is a normal creative process – accumulative energy, which will certainly one day be embodied in literature and drama, a creative breakthrough will result. We are waiting for this,” the director is confident.

His jury colleague Olga Mikhailova is even more optimistic:

– There were more than one or two good plays in the competition. There was a decent professional level. And I am sure that these plays should be interesting to the audience. Whatever plots the authors take on – be it a plot reminiscent of Schmitt’s famous novel about a sick child in the play by Mikhail Romanenko – or completely original, like “Moscow Station” by Anna Geyzhan, they are all placed in the real space of our lives.

Note that the next season of “Characters” differs from the previous ones in a new nomination. It is called “My Country” and involves the presentation of plays on topics related to the Great Patriotic War, the Great Patriotic War, Russian heroes of different eras, and in general with significant figures and achievements of Russia.

And here it does not matter whether the appearance of an exclusively patriotic nomination is the fulfillment of a state order or whether it is dictated by the beliefs of the organizers. If at the end we get a high-quality product that can be staged on the Russian stage, this will benefit the common cause.