Anecdotes is a unique production. Valery Fokin has joined together two unrelated literary works – Bobok, a frightening tale by Dostoyevsky, and 20 Minutes with an Angel, a short play by Aleksandr Vampilov. In Anecdotes, Vampilov's story of human mistrust is viewed by the director as a logical, not to say genetic, continuation of Dostoyevsky's cemetery fantasy. Vampilov's heroes are shown here as the descendants of the "living dead" whose conversations are overheard by the tipsy writer Ivan Ivanovich (Vladimir Mashkov). The writer witnesses dead people waste their last precious moments between worldly death and the eternal nothingness engaging in "lewd and indecorous behavior", and exclaims with a mixture of pleasant surprise and timid curiosity: "If such things go on here, what is to be said about the higher ranks... I will go there too, I shall listen everywhere!" This line is the bridge from Dostoyevsky to Vampilov, from the past to the present. The perfectly realistic tale of two Russian guys on a business trip, who wake up in their hotel hung over, go looking to score some cash and get terribly scared and angry when some "angel" (Yevgeny Mironov) gives it to them, is staged by Fokin as a very black comedy. A constant reminder of the fact that this very Russian, very recognizable and therefore very funny story is happening not just in some hotel room but in the "higher ranks" is the accompanying supernatural-sounding howls and the sound of the gravedigger's shovel...

(No longer in repertory)