Play Readings

Play readings written by acclaimed female voices from different generations.

17:30—19:00
LAND OF NO RETURN
by Marina Davydova

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. A year before that, in 1990, on the outskirts of the empire, in Baku — now the capital of sovereign Azerbaijan — pogroms took place, leading to the exodus of the city’s large Armenian diaspora. Two hundred thousand people left the land they had long considered their home. This ethnic conflict has since been overshadowed in people's memory by the more dramatic events of 1991, yet it was, in many ways, the beginning of the dissolution of the vast empire.

At the heart of the play is a lyrical heroine who, much like Tadeusz Kantor in his "Theatre of Death", watches the characters as they move through more than forty years of history. The events of 2022 cast a new light on what happened in the early 1990s, just as the tragedies of the early 1990s help us to understand the roots of the events of 2022.

In Land of No Return, all political theses, slogans, and trends are questioned. No ideological cliché withstands the test of time and history. The only enduring foundation for humanity remains the ability to show compassion and forgive one another.

Although the play is based on the author's personal experiences and is generally faithful to historical events, its plot and characters are fictional. Land of No Return was written at the end of 2022, commissioned by Munich's Residenztheater, which holds the rights to its premiere production. The text has been translated into several European languages (German, French, Romanian). As part of the Voices festival, its first reading in Russian will take place.

19:30—21:00
BERLIN SYNDROME
by Polina Borodina

“This is a painful and, I hope, funny text where I’ve gathered all my experience from insane Berlin dates and enduring an unbearable catastrophe in a new, bearable reality. It’s also my first original play written in exile, in a new context and from a new identity: it almost lacks the gravitational pull of Russia, and none of the characters share my background, even though most are immigrants and refugees. Why is this so important to me? In 2022, I thought my time as a playwright was over because I wouldn’t be able to create anything meaningful about either the new reality, which I don’t understand, or the old one, with which my connection is gradually fading. You know, almost two hundred years ago, Dostoevsky advised the émigré Turgenev to ‘bring a telescope from Paris’ to observe what’s happening in Russia, because — between the lines — it was clear he wouldn’t be able to write about French life anyway. I sincerely hope that this text proves I no longer need a telescope”.