Play "Chozyain kofeyni" (ru) from 15 to 17 November 2023

Review

Golubev Dmitry

Pavel Pryazhko in "The Coffee Shop Owner” explores not so much the field of consciousness of modern man as he tries to catch the "radio wave” or "cosmic impulse” of modern society, looking for support on semantic points that disappear as soon as they appear.

Here is a reference to the problems of intertextuality, the substitution of the concepts of postmodernity and metamodernity, and a return to the aesthetics of the theater of the absurd, and simple human confusion and insanity in front of a crazy world that splits our consciousness into millions of particles.

The main character, or a person, or a voice, or all together, is the naked nerve of an era that has absorbed brilliant creations and turbulent experiences of the past, and the pain of the present and fear of the future.

Each of us becomes for a moment a "Coffee shop owner” who cannot go beyond the narrow morality imposed by the world, ideas about society and culture, is not able to fly above everyday life due to the simple lack of wings behind his back.

But a miracle happens, since Art is the wings that arise from contact with another person, in the process of dialogue and listening, at the moment of gazing intently into the pupil of the interlocutor.

An existential crisis is not something that comes, it is a given, from which we cannot get out until the end of time, but which everyone is able to overcome alone, only by starting to articulate the inner emptiness and trying to see the light in this emptiness, sharing it with others.

Once upon a time the novel "Ulysses” was written in the genre of stream of consciousness, there were works by Sartre and Camus, Ionesco, Beckett and Kharms, Kafka and Vvedensky with their nonsense and obsession. Then nonsense and chaos themselves degenerated into modern constructions of the text of new absurdity, and today "The Owner of the Coffee Shop” by Pavel Pryazhko takes a worthy place among them, telling us about a person, speaking to us in a way that we are sometimes unable to speak even to ourselves.

Director Grigory Zhuravlev