Sasha Dugdale introduction to Ribbons by Pavel Pryazhko

Pavel Pryazhko is a writer from Belarus. He’s . . . he’s my contemporary. So he came of age as the Soviet Union collapsed and he started playwriting, I think in the 2000s. He had a series of plays which were produced and were developed by the new writing movement in Moscow. He’s done a lot of work in different genres. He’s also I think, associated with the Visual Arts Movement. So a sort of installation approach to to art. And he’s also an extremely poetic writer . . . It’s probably worth saying that I’ve translated the last few of his plays. Ribbons, the most openly political and activist of those plays – although it’s hard to call Pavel an activist – and the plays . . . the plays build on each other and they build a picture and they also build a sort of aesthetic which is really, really compelling. It’s not an aesthetic which is particularly about dramatic conflict, it’s something much, much more poetic. Much, much more observational and that fits the line I see in his work, which is more closely associated with the visual arts, perhaps.

I think that Pavel’s work sits on the boundaries of theatre, visual arts, poetry. It’s quite a hybrid sort of . . . working method. And for that reason I find it really compelling and interesting. But it is really hard and I can see how hard it will be for a director to stage, because Ribbons, for example, the stage directions are as important as the work, as the words of the cast members – that they have an innate poetic quality, they’re very highly sculpted. When I was translating them I spent an awful long time on stage directions so they’re not at all functional pieces of writing. They’re simply to arrange the stage. They have a huge poetic impact and so the play reads on the page and would be acted out in completely different ways. And there’s something about Pavel’s work which really defies boundaries and that’s really, really interesting. If this goes down to the voices that he . . . he uses, his voices are often verbatim there. He uses snippets of conversations he’s overheard on the street, conversations he’s had with his neighbours and he binds those into the work. And he does this in a way which is very estranging. So we hear normal speech, but it’s at odds with the situation. And in that he reminds me of a writer, like for example Samuel Beckett, and that writing is, is is just fantastic to translate, because it’s really, really full of texture and real life. And yet, it’s set there to look at, to be examined under the microscope.