Second Year

This season, another NTG hit that was consistently sold-out during the winter gets a transfer to the Kivotos Theatre. Nikolai is arrested on his way from Moscow to Podolsk, and is taken to a police station, where he is subjected to an eccentric interrogation that strains his sanity to its very limits.  After being quizzed on his general knowledge and what he knows of his hometown, tested on his observational and motor skills, and forced to make uncomfortable admissions and unearth buried memories, Nikolai has to face the fact that his humdrum life is not going to change; what must alter, however, is his attitude towards it.

Man from Podolsk is a disturbing satire with Kafkaesque overtones that questions the dominant culture of our age and the obligation to derive pleasure from our surroundings, have positive energy, and live a meaningful existence. At the same time, it sounds a warning about how the imaginative and sophisticated methods used by authoritarian regimes lead us to repress ourselves.

Born in 1969, Dmitry Danilov is a journalist, writer and poet with several awards to his name. His theatrical debut, Man from Podolsk, earned him Russia’s premiere theatre award, the Golden Mask, in 2018.