‘Attention, please be quiet!’

Oleg Zhukovsky is a returning and popular guest of THEALTER festival. He was a member of the famous Derevo for years, he left Russia (or rather the Soviet Union) with them in the early ’90s and settled down in Germany. In the past years he has also collaborated with other well-know Russian theatre groups (Ache, Formal Theatre), participated in prestigious international theatre festivals and created a couple of solo performances. He leads theatre workshops, too, writes poetry and is a photographer.

School for Fools is a lesson-long ‘interactive’ performance in which happy and carefree as well as disturbing and stressful childhood school memories reappear. Senior primary school teacher Zhukovsky strictly explains about the world while whipping his cane through the air, tests the pupils on their homework and reprimands and punishes troublemakers. The pupil-audience sometimes enjoy participation in the class work, and sometimes deeply fear being called out to the blackboard…

The source of the performance was the novel School for Fools by Sasha Sokolow, which follows the stream of consciousness of a boy, a pupil of a special school for disabled children. Zhukovsky adapted these elements in a simple and succinct, yet rich and metaphorical language for the theatre.