The Drunks

On our last night we saw a new Russian play called “The Drunks”. It was another play that was a part of the Revolutions series at the RSC where they commission new playwrights to write these plays to be put on at the RSC. I’m still digesting what exactly the play meant and what I thought of it. It seems like one of those plays where while I’m watching it I have no idea what’s going on but there’s some deeper meaning going on.

The basic premise was that a shell-shocked soldier comes to his home in Russia from some war to find that things are very different. Then three different people start to compete for his loyalty to boost their campaigns for mayor of the city. There was Boris Ivanovich played by the same guy who played Antigonus in "The Winter's Tale", Victor Victorovich played by my favorite Darrell D’Silva, and Sergey played by the fantastic Richard Katz. All three were fantastic. Boris Ivanovich was a power hungry leader with a 7% approval rating who was not very concerned with how his government was run. Victor Victorovich was a cop who was trying to return the city to old roots. And not in a good way. He was more concerned about acquiring old weapons like his sword Delilah or an old set of daggers and renaming the local paper to The Sword and Panther than running a city. Then Sergey was an old friend of Ilya’s now editing a newspaper who wanted to return the city to the people. There were some very disturbing scenes but some very funny ones as well.

I really didn’t understand what the main point of this play was. Ilya was shown on all the posters so I thought he would be the main character, but he hardly ever spoke. Ilya was the shell-shocked soldier and he was really cute. He didn’t have a lot of lines and his action mostly consisted of walking dazed around the stage. The plot lines were unclear. Obviously there is some important reason the playwright wrote the play, but it just wasn’t clearly conveyed to the audience.

Although the play itself was strange, the actors were fantastic at playing these odd characters. I really like the character of Victor Victorovich played by Darrell D’Silva. That man was absolutely brilliant in everything he was in and he played very different characters in each one. Also Richard Katz as the journalist was awesome.

As I’ve tried to digest this play I have only come up with a few possibilities as to what it is trying to convey to the audience. One of my classmates offered that all she gathered was that we should be nice to our war veterans. Perhaps the play was a critique on the government of Russia as there were three different parties vying for Ilya’s endorsement for the next election. I am not sure why the play was title “The Drunks”. Sure people drank a lot throughout, but I can’t connect the title to a main idea, except that alcohol caused Ilya’s hallucinations. Perhaps the play showed how much a town can be changed and effected by war. Ilya’s home town is drastically different when he returns to it exemplified by the fact that Communist Street had changed names to Democracy Street. I thought that was so ironic as the people in power were basically controlling tyrants still just under a different label. It may have been a critique on what a hero is. Ilya was praised as a hero because it was beneficial to the powers that be. My most general idea is that it was a critique of modern Russia and its brokenness and bleakness. The final scene gave me the idea that maybe the playwright is putting hope in the future generation. Ilya and Natasha leave a son who in the play was only shown as a beam of light. Russia is now in the hands of the next generation and it relies on them to try to heal the country. All in all, kind of a bleak play to end on! But I was glad this was the last play because if it had been one of the others I really would have been reluctant to leave Stratford!