Writer
Victor Erofeyev (original short story)
Director
Ben Harrison

Cast
Fergus McLarnon — Vova, Gregory Gudgeon — “I” (Husband), Tea Alagić — Masha, Rufus Wright — Petrov / Guard, Charlie Winston — Musician

Creative Team
Fred Meller — Designer
Natasha Chivers — Lighting Designer
Charlie Winston — Music / Live piano performance
Adaptation: Company devised from Victor Erofeyev’s short story
Development: Royal National Theatre Studio

“The worst thing in this fucking world is that people don’t know what they want. And we’re not talking about money, they don’t know what to do with themselves.” — Viktor Erofeyev

Masha and “I” inhabit a clean, white, carefully controlled space. Their world is defined by order, sterility, and self-protection—an environment designed to keep chaos at bay. What unsettles them most is disorder itself: mess, excess, the visceral “yuk” of bodily reality and inner psychological life.

This production stages the tension between containment and collapse, as the characters’ sanitized reality is gradually disrupted by what has been excluded from it. The work engages with themes of repression and release, suggesting that madness can be understood as a form of liberation—the eruption of the id, where forbidden impulses surface in relation to food, the body, and the mind.

At the same time, the piece remains aware of the ambivalence of this release: its anarchic energy is both compelling and dangerous. The result is a world in which control and chaos continually destabilize one another, exposing the fragility of constructed order.