Plays
The author of over 30 plays, he is best known for his play Русская народная почта (Russkaya Narodnaya Pochta, variously translated as The Russian National Postal Service, The Russian People's Post, etc.), for which he has won the 1997 Anti-Booker Prize for a stage play and the award for Best Play at Russia's Golden Mask Festival. The play first came to public attention at a dramatic reading during the 1997 Lyubimovka Festival of Young Playwrights; it was later produced in a revised form as Room of Laughter, directed by Kama Ginkas and starring Oleg Tabakov in 1998. It has subsequently been performed translated into English and French and has been produced in London, Montreal, and Washington, D.C. as well as around the Slavic world.
The Russian National Postal Service follows impoverished Russian pensioner Ivan Zhukov on his descent into madness. He engages in fanciful correspondence, writing letters to important world figures (living, dead, and fictional) and then writes replies to himself on their behalf. Prominent among his imagined correspondents are Elizabeth II and Soviet Russia's Vladimir Lenin, as well as cosmonauts, Russian officials, and Robinson Crusoe. The play has often been compared to the works of Nikolai Gogol for its absurdism and treatment of alienation.
Few of Bogayev's works other than The Russian National Postal Service have been produced in the English speaking world. His play Maria's Field (Марьино поле) received its United States premiere in 2009 by the TUTA Theatre of Chicago. The play explores the fate of three 100-year-old women on a journey through a Russian forest, encountering figures from their own past and from 20th century Russian history. Bogaev relates that the story was inspired by his grandmother, Anafisa, and others like her whose husbands were declared "missing" during war and who still hoped for their return. He writes "The fate of men was easier than the fate of women. It is harder to wait than to die." Despite the tragic theme of the play, it is leavened by a "whimsical and wistful" tone and a "comical cow" accompanying the women on their journey.
Read more about this topic: Oleg Bogayev
Famous quotes containing the word plays:
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“He plays o’the viol-de-gamboys, and speaks three or four languages word for word without book, and hath all the good gifts of nature.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“He that plays the king shall be welcome.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)