Vanemuine’s The Drunks finds the sacred in a night of excess

Vanemuine’s production of Ivan Võrõpajev’s The Drunks turns a night of drinking into a search for the sacred, writes Kaur Riisma in a review carried by ERR. The review first appeared in Sirp.

Võrõpajev often writes about secular people who do not think of themselves as religious but find themselves confronting something sacred. They may not recognise the myths and archetypes shaping their world, or see how ordinary life can give way to a different, spiritual reality.

The Vanemuine production is more expansive and energetic than a version staged by Theatrum a decade ago, Riisma writes. The theatre’s large stage allows the actors to fall harder and speak louder, while a band appears and disappears between scenes. A raised platform with seats recalls a previous production of Pavel Zobnin’s Illusions, with a wall-sized mirror facing the audience.

The scale risks turning Võrõpajev’s text into spectacle. Some viewers may see theological debate, while others may find the characters’ drunken chatter tiresome. But, compared with characters in the playwright’s other works, the cast and director have captured what Riisma calls the “Võrõpajev-like” person.

These characters fall through the everyday world into a sacred one and reach out for something to hold on to. Often that is love, which their speech links to God, the sacred, the self and eternity. Yet love usually remains simply love.

The characters in The Drunks feel that life is empty, drink heavily and discover that the rational truths they once relied on had kept their world in place. Their backgrounds are deliberately superficial: they work in advertising, banking and modelling. The play also includes a prostitute, whose work involves performing passion. Riisma sees a weakness in the choice to point to a banker as someone who knows little about life, calling it a low bar for dramatic conflict.

The final meeting between Rosa, played by Kristin Prits, and Mark, played by Reimo Sagor, could have become a simplistic scene in which a sex worker redeems humanity, but it does not, the reviewer writes. The production avoids that outcome by retaining another layer in the text: a major film festival is taking place in the background, and the word “festival” carries a more or less pejorative meaning of “carnival” depending on the character’s profession.