{"id":41305,"date":"2025-01-23T08:36:36","date_gmt":"2025-01-23T08:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=41305"},"modified":"2026-01-14T23:40:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T23:40:01","slug":"ivan-vyrypaev-i-believe-in-my-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/ivan-vyrypaev-i-believe-in-my-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Ivan Vyrypaev: “I Believe in My Mission”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ivan Vyrypaev is a playwright, director, actor, and teacher. He headed the “Praktika” theater and was one of Russia’s most sought-after playwrights. Today, he writes, directs, and runs the “Teal House” Integral Development Fund in Poland, which he created with his wife, actress Karolina Gruszka. Over the past three years, the fund has helped numerous actors forced to relocate to Europe.
On February 21 and 22, the Marylebone Theatre will host performances of Vyrypaev\u2019s unique project, Mahamaya Electronic Devices<\/em>. This is a collaboration between Teal House and Bird and Carrot Production, led by Alexandrina Markvo. Mahamaya<\/em> is a deeply conceptual spectacle, a meditation-performance exploring language and the word\u2014their possibilities (and, consequently, limitations) through the lens of human sensations and intellectual-philosophical pursuits. The emotional depth of the audience\u2019s experience is also due to the fact that Mahamaya<\/em> is entirely accessible to anyone, regardless of their life experience, origin, language, or education.
As a practicing yogi and thinker, Vyrypaev has shaped the mission of his fund around a unique philosophy: every project aims for development on all levels\u2014physical, intellectual, and spiritual. This is why our conversation with Ivan focused on the recent history of theater, its modern state, and how theater responds to the challenges of our time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of our meeting, when mentioning cigarettes and your smoking habit, you said, \u201cI\u2019m from the old world.\u201d Do you really feel that way?
<\/strong>I was referring to my smoking habit. All my teachers at the Shchukin Theater School smoked. I’ve been trying to quit my whole life, but when I write\u2014which I\u2019ve been doing for almost thirty years\u2014I smoke. It\u2019s a writer\u2019s habit. There was a period when I didn\u2019t smoke, but it wasn\u2019t a very good time for me. In general, I\u2019m a person from the old world, from old traditions, who unexpectedly found himself in the future. I live in the future, using some old habits from the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You recently said somewhere that we need to let go of old traditions…
<\/strong>No, never from traditions! I definitely didn\u2019t say that. We need to develop them\u2014and that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you write a play, does it have to be tied to the present? To the here and now?
<\/strong>Absolutely, absolutely. Drama is a very everyday thing. I am, perhaps, one of the few practicing playwrights today, and I live partly off royalties from my plays\u2014I truly make a living from it. Naturally, I get commissioned to write plays. And, of course, they\u2019re tied not just to a city but to the theater stage. I visit the theater, observe the audience\u2014how they react and to what. My job is essentially to serve the audience. There are plays that transcend this utilitarianism and remain timeless, like those of Chekhov or Moli\u00e8re.
In my view, Moli\u00e8re is the greatest and still unsurpassed playwright. He wrote plays primarily for a specific stage and audience.
Moli\u00e8re was first and foremost relevant to his time\u2014harsh, inconvenient. Today, we read Moli\u00e8re, and no one takes offense at him, but in the 17th century, his plays were almost always banned. Today, I\u2019m working on a Moli\u00e8re play for a French theater. I want modern French audiences to feel what audiences in Moli\u00e8re\u2019s time felt\u2014laughter, discomfort, outrage, and fear simultaneously. But when the theater management asks me to remove sharp elements for fear of backlash from the aggressive liberal-left community, I understand: this is Moli\u00e8re. He was feared and \u201ccanceled.\u201d Modern France today is even stricter, with censorship stronger than in the time of Louis XIV. Political correctness, cancel culture, fear\u2014these are the main components of French culture today. And not just French culture. This is why the nation needs Moli\u00e8re again. So they can ban and fight against him, but also love and desire him. To laugh heartily and enjoy classic comedy.
But I still have to compromise. I do it to continue the tradition of the great playwrights who were my teachers, among whom Moli\u00e8re holds the highest place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you handle this?
<\/strong>I believe in my mission. I want to preserve the great dramatic tradition rooted in the understanding that a play is an independent, authentic, literary work meant to be performed on stage. A play is a formula\u2014a score, a set of notes. A play is a performance. A true playwright writes performances. A play begins when an actor opens their mouth on stage\u2014that\u2019s when the play is born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the landmark plays of the early 2000s was undoubtedly your Oxygen<\/em>. Twenty years have passed\u2014does the play still resonate as it did then?
<\/strong>Right now, in Athens, an up-and-coming Greek director, George Koutlis, has created a grand production of the play at the Onassis Stegi venue, which seats a thousand people. I\u2019m going to see it in January. I immediately thought I should review the text to avoid backlash. I adjusted some things\u2014there were parts that needed rewriting since it was written in 2002, and life was completely different then.
But look\u2014these young people chose the play themselves. That means it works! Oxygen<\/em> was very popular in Europe, especially in France and Germany. However, I don\u2019t think they\u2019ll return to the play anytime soon\u2014perhaps never. Listen, it features two Russian characters, one of whom is a thug who kills people with a shovel. How could that be staged in Europe today? A play about a Russian shovel? As a producer, I wouldn\u2019t take on such a play now. I wouldn\u2019t even empathize with that Sanya character as an audience member.
But twenty years ago, it was a completely different time\u2014we were all still friends. There was a certain romanticism, with the release of TV series like Brigada<\/em> and films like Bumer<\/em>. Back then, Sanya was a trendy hero. Today, I\u2019d feel sick at the sight of a Russian guy with a shovel. Those Sanyas are committing crimes in Ukraine now. So staging Oxygen<\/em> is a big question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s just twenty years\u2014so little time!
<\/strong>So little, yet so much has happened, especially in the past three years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you lost many friends along the way?
<\/strong>Almost all of them\u2014those who didn\u2019t leave. But I\u2019ve been connecting with the younger generation a lot. Many young people from Russia write to me\u2014it\u2019s very sad and melancholic correspondence. They gather in apartments and read my plays. They ask, \u201cWe\u2019re doing a reading of your play, Ivan Alexandrovich, is that okay?\u201d Of course, it\u2019s very touching, and I tell them I\u2019d be delighted. So, there\u2019s this connection with such people, even though we\u2019ve never met.
But as for my old friends there? I think we\u2019ll part ways for good. There\u2019s a chasm between us now, even though we\u2019ve never quarreled, and I don\u2019t judge anyone. It\u2019s just that we\u2019re like strangers now. I feel that those who stayed will have to make significant adjustments because otherwise, they won\u2019t survive. To live there and earn a living, they\u2019ll have to stop speaking, and to stop speaking, they\u2019ll have to stop thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a saying: “In the house of the hanged, one does not speak of rope.”
<\/strong>In the house of the hanged, one avoids the topic out of respect and reverence for the deceased. But here, people don\u2019t speak out of fear, don\u2019t they? I fear we are irreversibly divided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you learned about the criminal case against you, were you scared?
<\/strong>I wasn\u2019t scared, but it was very unpleasant. I was teaching a yoga class and read the news about myself two minutes before it started. I was already seated in front of the class when an actress attending the session told me, \u201cDo you know what they\u2019re writing about you?\u201d But I carried on with the class\u2014it lasted an hour and a half.
It\u2019s unpleasant because there are now many countries I can\u2019t travel to. India, for instance, is a very important place for me\u2014I practice yoga but can\u2019t go there. Or I have to be cautious about flight routes and layovers. Say I\u2019m flying to Georgia, and there\u2019s bad weather, so the plane lands in Abkhazia\u2014that\u2019s it, I won\u2019t make it home.
But on the other hand, what\u2019s there to complain about? Here we are in London, while my friends in Russia are sitting in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you remember February 24, 2022?
<\/strong>I remember it very well. I was on tour in the city of Lublin with a Polish production of my play Sunny Line<\/em>. For forty minutes, I assured the actors there wouldn\u2019t be a war\u2014I completely convinced them. And then my wife called me at five in the morning… I was on my way home and kept calling Ukrainians\u2014all my friends. I had a premiere scheduled at the Drama and Comedy Theater on the Left Bank of the Dnipro.
At the start of the war, I had four plays running in Kyiv and thirty-five performances across Ukraine, and we were all friends. I called everyone… None of us could believe it. Even now, I can\u2019t believe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does yoga help you cope?
<\/strong>Of course, if it weren\u2019t for my practice, I would\u2019ve gone insane. I have an enormous workload, especially with the Teal House fund. People\u2019s lives are difficult, and on top of that, I constantly have to look for funding. I\u2019m not very skilled at that\u2014I\u2019m an artist, after all.
But no one asked us if we wanted this. It just so happened that my life suddenly filled with people who needed help. Ukrainian and Belarusian artists knew only me in Poland. And somehow, we all survived together\u2014sitting, drinking, crying. Then we started helping them get residence permits, which require monthly salaries. Otherwise, their permits would be revoked. I turned into a beggar. For the past two years, I\u2019ve been constantly asking for money. Yesterday I asked for money, and today I plan to ask for money again. I even went to America to raise funds, performing for entrepreneurs, reading my plays. We also win grants.
We\u2019re getting back on our feet\u2014our group is made up of amazing people, children, and there\u2019s a motivating atmosphere. But no one has time to rest. My team is starting to break down: the workload before Christmas was immense, with two premieres and two competitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does an artist need to change in themselves to handle financial matters?
<\/strong>No, this should be handled by knowledgeable people\u2014I\u2019m not the right person for it. I\u2019d like to focus on other things. We have an interesting integral program, with plenty that others could benefit from. For instance, we directly address the challenge of integrating non-native speakers into their environment, and it\u2019s a much bigger problem than I thought. Honestly, even I haven\u2019t fully integrated\u2014I only recently realized that, despite living in Poland for a long time.
I haven\u2019t become a Western playwright. I\u2019m still staged as a Russian author who\u2019s interesting to the West. For example, many of my plays were performed in Germany. But in the last two years, there hasn\u2019t been a single production. I think the context has changed due to the war\u2014perhaps they now need a Russian who writes about the war. But I don\u2019t have plays about the war.
Of course, my new play, The Cherry Man<\/em>, is imbued with the war. But I can\u2019t just mention Donbas, Kyiv, or rockets. I respect those who do, but I can\u2019t write directly about the war, especially while it\u2019s happening. I believe it\u2019s not necessary to talk about something you lack distance from. I\u2019m more interested in exploring what happens to a person\u2019s soul during such a terrible time, and for that, it\u2019s better to place them in a fictional scenario.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ivan Vyrypaev is a playwright, director, actor, and teacher. He headed the “Praktika” theater and was one of Russia’s most sought-after playwrights. Today, he writes, directs, and runs the “Teal House” Integral Development Fund in Poland, which he created with his wife, actress Karolina Gruszka. Over the past three years, the fund has helped numerous…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":41309,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"type_post":[184],"column":[],"class_list":["post-41305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60112,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41305\/revisions\/60112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41305"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=41305"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=41305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}