Dust and Unreal

Reading

Performance

A wondrous miracle, a marvelous wonder

Director Pavel Vashchilin: «The play ‘Dust and Non‑Existence’ is something like a myth that we, together with the playwright Ivan Andreev, created based on nostalgic childhood memories of the 1990s. In this play, we are looking for the main thing that drama can offer — a hero of our time.» Who is he? What is he like? In our tale about the past, everything is kind; we didn’t want to include any events that would tarnish the memory in this story. Its characters are ordinary people, probably familiar to everyone. They are both our neighbors and characters from old fairy tales at the same time. They just live their lives, wanting happiness — that’s all. The tale is about the search for happiness and one’s own «being,» and, of course, about being saved from captivity. And there are plenty of prisons in the fairy tale; each character has their own — it could be a shop, a factory, a tram, a little apartment with a leaking roof, or even their own head. All the characters try to escape from these prisons, each in their own way. Or maybe it’s not a fairy tale at all, but a true story. Or maybe it’s a fairy tale that never happened…