ISBN: 9781848420571

A darkly comic and freewheeling epic that gets to the heart of small-town politics and what it means to please all of the people all of the time.

A provincial town is in search of a hero. A shell-shocked soldier downs vodka on his return from the frontline in Chechnya. As Ilya arrives home he stumbles into the epicentre of an extraordinary power struggle that threatens to tear the town apart.

Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov have written over thirty plays, both individually and together, winning awards for their work at the Moscow Art Theatre and in countries throughout the world.

'A maelstrom of corruption, egomania and lubricious booziness, rendered in spicily idiomatic English by Nina Raine' London Evening Standard

First Staged: Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2009