Since the pioneering publication of Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama by Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky in 2009, there has been a proliferation of new scholarship focused on contemporary theater and performance in the post-Soviet space. Authors, including Julie A. E. Curtis in her edited volume New Drama in Russian: Performance, Politics, and Protest in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (2020), Molly Flynn in Witness on Stage: Documentary Theater in Twenty-First-Century Russia (2020), and Valleri J. Robinson in Belarusian Theatre and the 2020 Pro-Democracy Protests: Documenting the Resistance (2024), have thoroughly analyzed the relationship between post-Soviet theater and politics in the region. E. Susanna Weygandt’s From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Contemporary Russophone Drama and Performance Theory contributes to this body of work by shifting the attention to performance theory and, specifically, to dramatic and acting techniques unique to New Drama, a theater movement active in Russia from the mid-1990s to the early 2020s. Weygandt defines New Drama “as a new grammar for socially engaged texts that bring attention to real problems in contemporary Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine that go underreported in news coverage” (14). According to the author, however, this theatrical movement is distinguished from other important directions in theater and performance not as much by its politically and socially conscious plays, as by “a disembodied acting practice that focuses on voice, text, direct speech, documentary, and intonation” (10).

To contextualize New Drama within a larger cultural ecosystem, in her analysis, Weygandt relies on an impressive selection of materials pertaining to the history of Russian theater dating back to the early twentieth century. Within this cultural context, she explores the work of such eminent theater directors as Konstantin Stanislavskii, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Anatolii Vasiliev to highlight the antagonism and continuity of experimental Russian theater preceding the arrival of New Drama (Ch. 1). This chapter also establishes Weygandt’s theoretical approach characterized by the emphasis on “a paradigmatic shift from the ‘language of gesture’ … to ‘intonation as gesture’ in contemporary performance” (60).

By focusing on plays by the Russian playwright Mikhail Durnenkov, Ch. 2 examines innovative narrative techniques of New Drama, such as “direct utterance” (63) and the use of slang and everyday speech of marginalized characters (89). Durnenkov’s work, according to Weygandt, is particularly emblematic of New Drama’s most noteworthy tendencies because it highlights postindustrial urban settings, features desperate and outcast protagonists, and draws attention to present-day social issues in Russia. In this chapter, Weygandt argues that in Durnenkov’s plays, as well as in other works that constitute the Russian New Drama canon, “literary form coheres less around the character’s actions, and thus the plot, than around formal experiments with speech” (90).

In Ch. 3, Weygandt explores post-Soviet documentary theater and positions it as a subgenre within a larger framework of New Drama. In continuity with a theoretical angle that privileges sonic elements of speech on stage, Weygandt is specifically interested in “how characters and their settings are re-created through sound” (99). The author claims that reenactment of recorded speech verbatim in Teatr.Doc’s productions is a primary source of an authenticity effect that contemporary Russian documentary theater often seeks.

Other effects produced by characters’ speech on stage are examined in subsequent chapters on Ivan Vyrypaev’s work as a dramatist and a director (Ch. 4) and on the actress Polina Agureeva’s stage rendering of Vyrypaev’s plays (Ch. 5). Coming almost full circle, Weygandt evokes the notion of embodiment, central to Stanislavskii’s method, as a counterpoint to Vyrypaev’s emphasis on disembodied sounding voice to highlight the logocentricity of Russian New Drama. The author concludes her book with a case study of Agureeva’s stage performance, drawing attention to the important, often-overlooked role that female theater makers play in New Drama. Indeed, an exploration of a wider range of contributions by women, as well as by non-Russian playwrights, directors, and set designers, in the study could have expanded the scope and nuance of Weygandt’s argument about contemporary Russophone theater.

Overall, From Metaphor to Direct Speech is a concise and original examination of the fascinating phenomenon of New Drama in the context of Russia’s political, social, and cultural transformations in the past three decades. This book makes a valuable contribution to existing scholarship on post-Soviet theater and, generally, on performance.