Artistic interpretation of real traumatic events in Maria Ogneva’s play “Following the White Rabbit”

Abstract

The article considers the documentary and fictional components of M. Ogneva’s play “Following the White Rabbit”, which raises the theme of the trauma experienced in the past. The play is based on real events related to the violent death of two teenage girls. In this play, the tragic event is taken out of the storyline and the attention is focused on the understanding of the tragedy by a female friend and the mothers of the girls. The article studies the techniques used by the author to create the fictional world of the play: allegory, allusion, a combination of real and fantasy elements, division and montage, work with documentary materials of a judicial practice, the “verbatim” technique, different types of discourse and different “points of view” to describe one and the same event. As a result of the analysis, we  conclude that the strategy used by the author is comparable to a fairy tale therapy (the method of psycho-correctional work): the therapeutic effect is achieved by pronouncing the traumatic experience in the presence of the audience, by the characters’ searches for various options for getting out of the spiritual crisis, by launching the process of continuous moral and ethical self-identification at the viewer’s level, i.e. by correlating the characters’ experience with their own destiny.