Parikmacherscha – The Hairdresser

Irina is between thirty and forty years old and the protagonist of Sergei Medvedev’s play The Hairdresser. She runs a small hairdressing salon called Spring with her friend Tatjana, somewhere in the Russian provinces. She dreams of a simple, happy family life complete with husband and children. Yet for all the admirers who regularly return to her salon to have their heads shaved, she remains unlucky in love. She has already had one failed marriage with a crazy “artist”, and now she is dreaming of a second try with a man who is still in prison for murdering women. In his letters full of yearning he promises to fulfil her dreams – the love of a lifetime, a family, and a new life in Moscow. But none of these will ever be realized, least of all the move to Moscow. He visits her at the hairdressing salon, gets her pregnant, steals her money, bashes her skull in with a hammer, and finally sets fire to her. She survives, still in love with him.

Nobody could actually be quite as blind and naive as Irina. So is her characterization the meanest expression imaginable of the stereotypical hairdresser? Yet Medvedev’s text, partially written from Irina’s point of view, is affectionate, deeply moving, and full of situational comedy. The comedy turns into horror which in turn becomes a joke; the combined effect is infectiously illusory.
Iris Laufenberg

Sergei Medvedev was born in 1960 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where he still lives. He studied physics at the local university and in Moscow and was subsequently a military engineer. He has been a journalist for various newspapers since 1995 and is the lyricist to the rock bands 12 Volts and NET. Between 2003 and 2007 he was editor-in-chief of a regional daily paper. In addition he works for a number of publishing houses. He has been a playwright since 2006, producing such works as “The Unhappy” and “Four Stories About Love”. He was awarded second place at the Eurasia festival and the New Drama festival in Moscow for “The Hairdresser”. It was recently performed at Teatr Praktika in Moscow and was also published in Ural magazine.