| Chelovek iz Podolska |
The Man from Podolsk
Play. Moscow 2017 / Movie 2020. |
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Foreign rights:
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Germany, Greece |
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Awards:
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2018 Golden Mask (Russia’s most prestigious theatre award) |
An absolutely ordinary young man, an electro musician and resident of the Moscow-area city of Podolsk, finds himself in an ordinary Moscow police station. He’s being held for no apparent reason, no explanations, he committed no crime. Strange intellectual police officers (there are three, one of them is a beautiful woman) begin asking the detained strange questions - first about his town, then about the things he sees every day on his way to work, generally about what he’s surrounded by in his mundane life, then about world cities that he’s visited, about his music, his relationships with women. During this strange conversation, he understands that his life is entirely meaningless and empty. That he lives without seeing anything, has no interest for anything apart from his tiny errands, doesn’t love anything or anyone, is catastrophically inattentive and lives as if he’s asleep. He keeps waiting for some horrors to begin, that he’ll be tortured or something of the sort- but the horrors are nowhere to be seen, no one’s torturing him, he’s just asked strange questions, and when morning comes, he’s released with an acute feeling of the emptiness of his own life. He’s also warned that he’ll be continuously arrested and is advised to prepare, read Wikipedia, etc. Completely confused, the hero leaves the police station (the police officers give him a lift to the nearest metro station).
