Plasticine

Plasticine is a play by Vasslly Sigarev.

Vassily Sigarev is one of the most profiled and produced contemporary playwrights in Russia. He has won a series of awards including the Russian Anti-Booker award (2000) and London Evening Standard Award for the most promising playwright (2002, Sigarev was the first non-English language nominee) for his play Plasticine.

Plasticine is about Maxim, a young boy midway into puberty, who has problems becoming comfortable in his body as well as in the society surrounding him. He is a loner, tired of life, he has no real friends and his life lacks direction. He seeks refugee in playing with plasticine, which he controls and can shape the way he wants to – as opposed to himself. Through this game a young and troubled child’s mind is revealed, one with poor conditions for coping with life, but still filled with creativity and creative powers.

The first time Vassily Sigarev confronted theatre workers with the Plasticine text, they became physically sick. "I considered this a first victory, a sign that the text moved something inside of them, and I want theatre to move and disturb us," Sigarev has said.

Vasilly Sigarev grew up in the town Verkhnaya Salda in Siberia, a town which prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union was an industrial centre with the only titan mine in Russia. Like so many young people Sigarev directly experienced the vacuum after the collapse. The young ones began to intoxicate. Sigarev's brother ended in jail, his mother fell ill and his father disappeared, like most fathers, into the hell named vodka. Sigarev, however, managed to get away and he began to write for the stage.

Sigarev has first-hand experience from the world he describes in his plays. Aged 23, he won the award for the most promising playwright in London with Plasticine. With Plasticine, Sigarev got his international break-through and the play has been performed all over Europe. In a dystopian world in which all kinds of humanism are gone, we follow a young boy’s journey of fate. In the battle between hope, determinism and free will, the 14 year old boy is driven to brutal insight, in which his creative force and inherent potential gives him strength, while it also makes him an outcast. With the same qualities as plasticine the boy is shaped, unshaped and reshaped until he hardens. How do we choose to manage the potential in our children, which opportunities are they given, what are they exposed to, and how do we treat those who fall outside?"

SOURCES:

Performance program and spring program 2009 from BIT Teatergarasjen. 10.08.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no/article/200