Exfoliation
Originally printed in 2006 by Kaftan Smekha, Anatoly Riassov's play was translated into English by Julia Heilingenbeil and published in 2007.
The Play Itself
Although 'Exfoliation', analogously to a classic dramatic performance, has a plot, climax and conclusion, this action is based not on the logical, but emotional and associative links. It is not the plot that plays the key tole (in spite of its being 'dissolved' in the performance), but categories and metaphors, being the conceptual stem.
Units of the theatrical language, split and irrelevant at the first glance, merge into a strange conglomerate. This foliated form renders the idea of a splitting absolute, a broken mirror where for a moment the protagonist sees the reflection of the real World. To render, to reconstruct the absolute becomes his only need. However, as the action proceeds, the character realizes that it is hardly possible, as he feels himself starting to decompose.
One of the key allegories of 'Exfoliation' is the child, an unbegooten infant inside a placenta )hence the painful haunting symbolism of the childhood. In spite of the psychoanalytical hypothesis of the fetal felicity, 'golden age' of the unconscious, this infant is haunted with pre-natal unrest and dismay; or rather the myth of that fetal bliss in 'Exfoliation' is merged with existential horror. The 'political' layer of the action is in some way correlative to it, with its permanent metamorphosis of liberalism and fascism appearing to be interacting elements of one anti-personal universal called the spectacle.
