The Conflict in Ivan Vyrypaev’s Dramaturgy

Abstract

The article deals with the specific features of the dramatic conflict in the plays of the modern playwright, director, actor Ivan Vyrypaev (born in 1974), who works in Russia and Poland. We explore the nature of the conflict in his plays written in the 2010s (Iranian Conference (2017), Disquiet (2018) and others). In that period, new tendencies in the development of the dramatic conflict appeared in Vyrypaev’s works, with the conflict being based on the clash not between characters, as before, but between discourses: currently relevant ideas, statements, the rules and attitudes behind them determined by public moods. This strategy clearly reflects the author’s position: the playwright understands his text as an opportunity to represent discourse, as he has often mentioned in his interviews. The material of the study determined the research methodology: the discursive nature of Vyrypaev’s drama is analyzed using the ideas and methods of discourse analysis developed by Michel Foucault, Teun van Dijk, etc. In the course of research, we analyzed Vyrypaev's play Closed Study. New Constructive Ethics (2021) in detail. The analysis has shown that the conflict in the play develops consistently: from the representation of currently relevant discourses to their dramatic collision. Further, the very reliability of discourses, of their boundaries is problematized through the construction of double communication: communication is built not only between the characters on stage but also between the author and the audience. In Closed Research. New Constructive Ethics, currently relevant discourses of the ‘new ethics’ are deconstructed. The audience sees on stage a conflict imperceptible to the characters, formed both by the contradiction between discourses and by the viewer’s knowledge of the characters’ off-stage life circumstances. Understanding the discursive nature of the conflict in Vyrypaev’s plays expands the existing understanding of the Russian ‘new drama’ as a whole.