Playing the Victim

The Presnyakov Brothers, translated by Sasha Dugdale

WHO    Valya, thirty.

TO WHOM    The audience (see note on ‘Direct audience address’ in the introduction).

WHERE    A room in a flat, in a town in Russia.

WHEN    Present day.

WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED    Valya, thirty, is still living with his parents. Having dropped out of university, he works for the police, playing the victim in crime reconstructions. He is lazy and hates having to do anything that he does not want to do. He has become a master of excuses, and when his mother asks him to buy bread he convinces her that the flat bread they like is most probably poisoned, putting her completely off the idea and saving himself the trouble of going to get it. In this speech, close to the beginning of the play, he explains his reasoning.

WHAT TO CONSIDER

•	The play is a farce.
•	Valya is an eccentric. Read the play to understand the way he thinks and speaks.
•	At certain points in the script, the playwrights refer to him not as ‘Valya’ but as ‘VOICE’. What might this suggest?
•	The cultural and political background. Familiarise yourself with modern Russian history. At its heart the play makes comment on the corrosive effects of living in fear.

WHAT HE WANTS

•	To share in some detail his mechanisms and strategies for coping with fear. Throughout the play, Valya appears quite lonely. Decide to what extent he regards the audience as his friend with whom he is safe to express himself and give voice to his fears.
•	To make sense of his own behaviour. To understand it himself.
•	To survive.

KEYWORDS  out  never  lazy  deeper  fear  afraid  scared  scare  drowned  drowning  punishing/punished/punish

Valya

I was always good at thinking up ways to get out of things. From when I was a kid, I never did anything I didn’t want to. And not because I was lazy… That’s not the reason, or at least that’s a reason, but there’s something else deeper which makes me lazy. I think it’s fear. Sometimes I’m afraid just to go out in the street. I’m afraid to go for bread, or take a walk. And then comes the laziness… Maybe, if you could find out, you might find that there’s a reason for fear, as well… Still, I’ve stopped being scared of everything that used to scare me because I can think of ways to get out of everything. Even in school, in junior school, when they started taking us to the swimming pool and I was scared of water – my mum almost drowned when she was young, that was before I was born, so it must be that it carried through to me… I mean, her fear of drowning was carried through to me, although she was a good swimmer actually, and even after she almost drowned she didn’t stop swimming – but I can’t stand water, deep rivers, seas… I never go in – not even to my knees… I don’t like crossing bridges either. And in school, when they started taking us to the swimming pool for PE, I just didn’t take my swimming trunks with me and they wouldn’t let me into the swimming pool, because according to the rules you couldn’t go swimming in the same pants you were wearing for hygiene reasons, although I suppose you could have been walking around in clean pants anyway… But they didn’t take into account that people could be walking around during the day in clean pants. Or I suppose you could take swimming trunks, but dirty ones, and give everyone a nasty little dose of something. Anyway, I never took my trunks, I used to pretend I’d forgotten. They told me off, but never gave me a detention and I pretended I really wanted to go swimming and I begged them to let me in in the pants I was wearing… But they didn’t let me and they thought they were punishing me like that. By the way, if people think you’re being punished as it is, they never punish you any more… Yeah…