Dear Yelena Sergeyevna

A quartet of graduating high-school students show up unannounced with a bouquet, champagne and crystal glasses to wish happy birthday to their lonely maths teacher. A gesture that seems touching at first sight turns out to be the most perfidious game of evil and cruelty: the students want the professor to give them the key to the safe where the questions for the final exams are kept. To her question: “Why does a person sometimes choose evil?” these young people will respond: “Because evil is pleasure. And we truly have very few pleasures in this world.”
In the time when academic titles are bought en masse, when parents sue teachers and when students organise killings of classmates and teachers, the play Dear Yelena Sergeyevna, written in 1980, seems like an experiment of greenhorns. But it all started back then. And although the Soviet authorities banned the play for a couple of years, it didn’t stop the development of the events that brought us to the point where we are now. At the end of the Soviet socialism when money started messing up the heads of the socialist youth as well, the quartet decided to take their fate and future in their own hands, using the methods that the system in which they grew up had been covertly teaching for decades. Thus this play showed for the first time not only that young people are no longer the flowers of our soil, but also the failures of their parents in rearing them. The story is a sinister view of a world without ideals and values, in of which we stubbornly behave as if others are the ones responsible.
Two and a half decades later, after surviving the transition to neoliberalism, the play by one of the most important and widely produced Russian playwrights Lyudmila Razumovskaya (1949, Riga, Latvia), whom the world – because of her radical thinking for the system – only met after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seems like an ominous foretelling.
Director Alen Jelen made his début on the Nova Gorica stage with this psychological play that reflects the new generation whose “god is money” and shows the horror of young people living without social security and without any prospects for a social future.