Techniques of Breathing

“In a hospice for the terminally ill somewhere in Russia, 19-year old Nadia is spending her last weeks contemplating what it means to be alone. In a city, also in Russia, a group of young urban types are holding a brainstorming session: their brief is to come up with a new religious cult that will make them a lot of money. And in a dilapidated flat, Nadia’s doughty mother contemplates her failing career as an actress and, as she prepares to go on stage once again, the extent to which she desperately needs money. Although these people are socially and geographically separated from each other, they are linked by the same preoccupation: what to believe in a country that, at the turn of the 21st century, has seen the dream of democracy and progress wither and die.

Written by Russian playwright Natalia Moshina, and revived here by far-sighted English company Sputnik Theatre, this is a poetic, allegorical but also lucid dispatch from a country in crisis. The fragmented structure, with its bullet point snapshots of isolated lives, comments on an increasingly atomised way of life.

Translator and director Noah Birksted-Breen brings these vignettes together with remarkable fluency and sass, accentuating through a quiet, nervy claustrophobia the extent to which these people have been cut adrift, while also characterising each of them with warmth and intimacy. The lack of resolution is teasing but also pleasing.” Metro

“Anyone in any doubt as to the seriously crazy state of contemporary Russia need look no further than the theatre of Natalia Moshina. In three apparently unrelated storylines, which experiment with dramatic convention but never quite abandon it, she lays bare a fractured tale of life in an almost anarchic climate. A girl dies defiantly of cancer; students wrangle over a farcically amoral economics project; an ageing actress endlessly replays the dismally perfumed story of her life in her dressing room. It’s far from cheering stuff, but there’s a blissful lack of bitterness to Moshina’s writing, and her dialogue shifts mischievously between profound musings on God and his apparent disinterest in capitalism, to flippant, sardonic one-liners.

For which much credit must go to Noah Birksted-Breen, the translator and director of this new Russian play. The script remains intimately rooted in its context without losing any of its urgency and impact, and his staging is unflaggingly inventive, boasting some finely tuned performances, particularly from Rebecca Gross and Margaret Tully as the broken family at the story’s heart, and Daniel Bayle as Timofe, who delivers an electrifying monologue on Russia’s incipient implosion.” Time Out