Two for the Road

7 minute read
YURI ZARAKHOVICH

Pretty much everywhere is a long way from the Presnyakov brothers’ hometown of Yekaterinburg deep in the Ural Mountains. But that’s O.K. “A life on the go adds grist to our impression mill,” says Oleg Presnyakov, 37, as he and his brother, Vladimir, 32, packed for a trip to Berlin to attend an opening of their 2003 play, Playing the Victim. It’s a good thing the duo don’t mind life on the road. Their increasing popularity as two of the world’s hottest young playwrights has made itineraries like Moscow to Sydney via Tokyo, or Boston to Transylvania via London, routine as they attend their plays’ premieres and workshops.

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That’s quite a change from four years ago, when Oleg and Vladimir were teaching literature and social sciences at the Yekaterinburg State University, writing little-seen dramas and running an amateur theater they founded in the mid-1990s. But in 2002, a staff member of the British Council, an organization that promotes cultural exchanges, watched rehearsals for the brothers’ play Terrorism in Moscow and recommended it to the Royal Court Theatre in London. In spring 2003, Terrorism debuted at the Royal Court, the Presnyakovs’ first opening outside Russia. It was roundly applauded by critics — London’s Guardian newspaper called it “a dazzling apocalyptic farce” that “suggests the novels of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.” Since then, the brothers have become the most frequently staged Russian playwrights after Anton Chekhov. “There isn’t a day that their plays are not performed someplace the world over,” says Judy Daish, the Presnyakov Brothers’ London-based agent.

To say the twosome have a symbiotic relationship would be an understatement. Oleg, the elder, is also the bigger and more garrulous of the pair. Kid brother Vladimir, meanwhile, is slighter and more taciturn, but quick with a smile and a mischievous joke — or an existential musing about the nature of their brotherhood. “We have often wondered if just one of us exists, while the other is just a figment of his imagination,” says Vladimir. “Except,” adds Oleg, “we never got to sort out which of us is which.” That exchange is indicative of how the brothers work on their original and absurd yet realistic and alarming pieces. They are in constant discourse, shuttling ideas, words and images back and forth and jotting them down, whether at a meal, backstage, strolling or waiting for a flight. It was while waiting for a flight at Frankfurt airport, in fact, that they plotted out To Kill the Referee, their first novel. It was a best seller in Russia last year and is now being adapted to film.

The story is told by one of four protagonists who live in the Russian wilderness. A Chechnya vet, he is now a sniper guard for the local nuclear plant. His job is to shoot first. His friends Hotdog and Pepsi, parking-lot attendants, make their living stealing gas from cars. Natasha has slept with two of the three and now runs an international Internet mail-order bride service called Amour Transit, patronized by the fsb (former kgb) and foreign-intelligence services. It’s an empty existence of anger and boredom punctuated only by what’s on television that night. “Those who created the dumbest of the comic books,” says the nameless sniper, “created our present.” One day, the friends are watching the World Cup on TV together, and when the mediocre Russian side inevitably loses, they blame not the players but the referee. “We’d have lost anyway, but what right does he have to decide against us?” The outcome adds to their feeling that the world is against Russia. The friends want vengeance. They set out to find, and try to kill, the referee.

There has always been an international dimension to the Presnyakovs’ work. Written before Sept. 11 and the 2002 Moscow theater hostage disaster, their first worldwide hit, Terrorism, is not just a prophetic glimpse of the public violence with which we’ve since become more familiar; it’s also a deeply disturbing commentary on human relations and the ways that people terrorize those closest to them. In the play, soldiers turn away passengers from an airport targeted by terrorists. But, in the privacy of the barracks, the soldiers habitually brutalize each other, driving one of them to suicide. The passengers, meanwhile, can’t help but torment their own families: one comes home to find his wife with a lover and murders them both.

Playing the Victim, the brothers’ more recent work, is similarly disturbing. It revolves around Valentin, a student who gets a job playing the victim in police crime-scene reconstructions. Even though they are simulated, his repeated participation in one gruesome end after another highlights the violence and brutality endemic in contemporary life. Meanwhile, in a parallel plot that parodies Shakespeare, the ghost of Valentin’s father tells him that he was poisoned by his brother who later married Valentin’s mother. While the finale is inevitable — Valentin takes his mother, his uncle and his girlfriend (who has become a bit too insistent about getting married) to a final meal — its setting is not: a Japanese restaurant where he feeds them fugu, a fish that’s filled with lethal toxins unless filleted perfectly. (The film version of the play, for which they wrote the screenplay, won the Best Film prize at the Rome Film Festival this year.) Not that any of the Presnyakovs’ delicious plot twists are ever final, mind you. “We love remaking our works,” says Vladimir. “Playing with our characters again and again lets us see how their situations are developing.” In the British version of Playing the Victim, for example, the police captain who reconstructs murders gets bumped off — and his murder gets reconstructed by another captain. Including their rewrites, the brothers can’t recall how many plays they have penned. “The book of our five favorites was published last year, but there have been more,” says Oleg uncertainly.

Today, the Presnyakov brothers’ Yekaterinburg theater no longer exists, and their hometown doesn’t seem to be aware of their world fame. The brothers shrug it off. They launched their theater, they say, when many people were traumatized by misguided reforms that suddenly wrenched their lives out of joint. The theater tried to help people cope with an uncertain future. These days, however, they see different problems on the rise. “This country is getting rigidly controlled again,” Oleg says. “Once the brief spell of freedom shrinks, the state accepts only its controlled appointees, rather than those who spring up spontaneously.”

Reluctant to anchor themselves to the ownership of apartments or cars, the brothers prefer to drift between their parents’ and friends’ homes in Yekaterinburg and various countries and continents. Still, they won’t leave Yekaterinburg for good, because its subway, street-car stops and sidewalks are key sources of characters and language. “Our works are written essentially in the language of the people we live among,” says Oleg. But with the brothers’ world travels, they’ve discovered that their art taps into the universal well of emotions that transcends dialect and local geography. “The best thing,” says Oleg, “is when, in São Paolo or Budapest, Stockholm or Toronto, people come up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve expressed just what I have on my mind, what really bothers me.'”

And how’s this for universal appeal: in the play the brothers are working on now, a sales clerk is trying to sell Noah a new brand of potato chips. Some sweepstakes coupons come with every purchase, and the grand prize is a yacht. Might come in quite handy, goes the salesman’s pitch, they say a deluge is coming. Skeptical, Noah buys a pack.

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