Manhattan, New York. The apartment of the famous American writer of Polish-German descent, Ula Richter. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, she is a reserved and discreet person, granting an important interview to the Polish journalist Krzysztof Zieliński.

The interview carries a double stake: for Krzysztof, it could be a springboard to a career in New York, the media capital of the world and every journalist’s dream; for Ula, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to tell the truth — or perhaps to provoke confusion, thus creating a new personal myth.

“Ms. Dorina Lazăr, in an absolutely fantastic role, with overwhelming force and scenic truth.”

Bobi Pricop

“I’m so consumed by disquiet… by the disquiet of the role… of the actor in the role… of the actor standing still in front of the audience, that only the author’s lines, Viripaev’s lines, come to my mind: love means disquiet…[…] love is you, you are the disquiet that flows into my chest…[…] disquiet is the thirst to love someone who flows eternally […]”

Dorina Lazăr

For Ivan Vyrypaev (b. August 3, 1974), the most well-known and most frequently staged contemporary Russian playwright, theatre and film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor currently based in Poland and banned from theatres in his homeland due to his anti-war stance, theatre is an art form inherently tied to “language, style, beautiful words, and phrases.”

At present, Ivan Vyrypaev has been sentenced in absentia by Moscow for spreading false information about the Russian armed forces and is internationally wanted.

“What interested me in Vyrypaev’s play, beyond the extraordinary poetry of the text, is how it transforms a PR interview about the Nobel Prize and a successful literary career into an inquiry into the boundaries between the artist and his art, between the creator’s dark past and the light his work brings into the world. I think it’s important to open up this conversation, especially now, when there’s so much controversy around the personal lives of canonical artists whose right to still be considered as such is being questioned due to utterly condemnable personal choices.”

Bobi Pricop

Written in 2018, the play is a story about authors who create not only their works, but also their own myth the most specific and intense, as well as the most dazzling and authentic reality.

“Disquiet is, above all, a performance about the relationship between art and life, between creation and the creator, between love, God, and all the things we try to give meaning to (precisely through faith, art, or love). Like life, theatre is and provokes disquiet; each of us is a bundle of disquiet that art, in all its forms, tries and perhaps even helps to untangle.”

Bobi Pricop

Disquiet is the fourth play by playwright Ivan Vyrypaev directed by Bobi Pricop.