Dear Yelena Sergeyewna (Liebe Jelena Sergejewna)

Four school students visit their teacher to wish her a happy birthday. But behind the kind gesture is cold-hearted plan: they want to blackmail her for the key to the school safe in order to forge the results of their final maths exam. There is a great deal at stake for them. The birthday party soon turns into a power struggle in which Yelena Sergeyevna tries to defend her ideals against the increasing unscrupulousness and brutality of the tenth-graders. Soon it is no longer about grades and their chances for the future, but about moral integrity and ultimately naked survival.

This intimate, thriller-like play was censured shortly after its premiere in the 1980s, as it can be read as a parable of a USSR caught between dictatorship and unbridled egoism. Later it enjoyed success both in and outside Russia, and was filmed and recorded as a radio play.

The director Jan Friedrich brings this claustrophobic drama to the stage with Judith Hofmann and four young actors.