CREATIVE TEAM

 

Designer Grace Farrow-Moore
Lighting Designer Caitlin MacGregor
Sound Designer Hattie North
Composer Savva Rozanov
Movement Pete Losasso
Voice and Dialect Support Emma Woodvine
Singing Support Mark Oldfield
Fight Support Philip d’Orleans
Captioner Jenny Skene

CAST

​

WPC Lyuda Becky Bush
Waitress in Café / Swimming Pool Official /
Waitress in Japanese restaurant Claira Gayer
Dolzhansky – 1st Criminal /
Zakirov – 2nd Criminal /
Verhushkin – 3rd Criminal Alfie Lockwood
Father / Police Inspector 1 / Police Inspector 2 James Pedley-Holden
Valya Oliver Ridgway
Mother / Police Sergeant Natalie Vaughan

Play by the Presnyakov Brothers

​

“I’m not stupid. I understood a long time ago that in order to avoid doing something, you have to do something else. If you want to avoid something nasty, you have to do something you don’t like either, but it helps you avoid something worse.”

 

A young man drops out of university and joins the police. He hasn’t done anything wrong; he just needs a job—and his is a peculiar one: at crime reconstructions, he plays the victim. Perhaps, if he gets close enough to death, he can cheat his own. 

​

The Presnyakov brothers were born in Sverdlovsk, in the Urals—Oleg in 1969, Vladimir in 1974. Both studied at the Gorky Urals State University, in Yekaterinburg, and went on to teach there, Oleg literary theory and philosophy, Vladimir sociology and political science. They founded the university’s youth theatre and made their names with experimental work. Through the Royal Court and the British Council’s new-writing program in Russia, their play “Terrorism,” translated by Sasha Dugdale, reached London in 2003, to acclaim from critics and audiences alike. “Playing the Victim” premièred that same year at the Edinburgh Fringe, in a co-production between the Royal Court Theatre and Told By An Idiot.