Vlad is a young professional working in Moscow's money markets. He is not yet 25, but already owns his own apartment, has a beautiful girlfriend and a bright future. Yet Vlad is consumed by anxiety, a feeling that there is something missing from his life. Disconnecting from his pressured money-oriented existence and the middle-class comforts of yoghurt and yoga, he leaves the safety of his flat and plunges into Moscow's murky by-ways on a quest to find the meaning of life. Here, on the mean streets of Putin's Russia, in the toilets of a taxi office and in the stairwells of run-down suburban flats, he confronts the hoodlums, druggies, beggars, hustlers and lost souls who form part of the new Russia.
A former gang member turned playwright, Yuri Klavdiyev's drama has more than a whiff of authenticity, and his strange, unsettling play is part dream, part nightmare and wholly intriguing. What appears in the early scenes to be an absurdist drama about the tyranny of the office gradually transforms into a brutal, in-yer-face dissection of the desolation of modern Russia, a place where a taxi driver can drive around with a corpse, the police are more terrified than those they are supposed to protect, and the vulnerable are pissed on. Quite literally. Eventually, the whole thing spirals off into more existential territory.
Noah Birksted-Breen's production has a beautiful economy and is acted just so. And, though the play doesn't really hold together and goes on too long, the best bits are real itch-in-your-brain stuff. For all its flaws, this is a play written and produced with genuine passion. Sputnik Theatre should be proud.
· Until December 8. Box office: 020-7837 7816.
