It’s not worth living without oxygen

Oxygen is the title of our new premiere, staged for the first time in Hungarian language in Romania on the 16 th November, at 7 p.m.

“The performance for me is about contradiction. About the confusion that characterizes our whole world, which is in fact the enlargement of our inner distended contradiction. Because our conscience constantly fights what our instincts dictate. Our raising, our culture, politics, the media, and our whole environment is always warning us that it is a crime to listen to your instincts. But what about our instinct for survival? Let’s say, you are drowning, and in order to be able to breath, you have to sacrifice something. Something that is important for you. What would that be?” – raises the question the director of the performance, Tibor Pálffy.

Tibor Pálffy is known first of all as an actor, but recent years have introduced him as stage director as well. Oxygen is not his first direction of a Vyrypaev play, we have seen Illusions from the same playwright in the season of 2019/2020.

Ivan Vyrypaev, playwright, movie director, screenwriter, theatre director and actor is one of the leading figures of the Russian movement New Drama. He was born in Irkutsk in 1974 and is considered a milestone in contemporary Russian theatre milieu for more than 20 years.

Together with Victor Ryzhakov, they established an artistic movement called Oxygen – the name of which came from Vyrypaev’s drama – and it makes an attempt to create a new theatrical language. It celebrates its 20 th anniversary, as it was written just a year after a pilot decided to fly into the twin towers. But in the long run both the pilot and the fireman choking in the smoke after the explosion have both the same aim. Finding oxygen! But whereas one is choking from the fume, the other is choking from the world’s ruling injustice.