Four women are locked in a narrow bunker, completely cut off from the world. They don’t know how much time has passed, whether it’s night or day. They suffer, rejoice, dream, love, hate, sort out their relationships in their close-knit female collective, and make plans for the future. They believe that the time will come when the bunker door will open, and they will be free.

From the outside, it seems like there are four little puppies whining in a sealed box. But the person who locked them in there knows that a terrible power is hidden within them, capable of destroying the whole world. These puppies are newborn goddesses of destruction, and if they break free, the end of the world will come.

The play “Blondi” by the well-known Belarusian playwright Dmitry Bogoslavsky is directed in a real bomb shelter by the young Moscow director Nikolai Berman—a disciple of Boris Yukhananov, the creator of the Electra Theatre “Stanislavsky,” and the longtime director of the Meyerhold Center, Viktor Ryzhakov. This is a theatrical experiment in which four actresses are left alone with each other and the audience, playing without artificial scenery, props, and external effects, subject to the will of the “director” reading the stage directions.

Where is the boundary between the actress and her character, the theater and reality, war and peace, life and death? What is freedom? How to attain it, and is it possible at all? Is it better to sit in a cramped bunker and dream of it, or go outside only to realize that it doesn’t exist? The performance poses these and other questions, trying to find a place for humans in a rapidly changing and completely deranged world, which seems almost unbelievable in the new reality in which we all find ourselves.