A darkly comic and freewheeling epic that gets to the heart of small-town politics and what it means to please all of the people all of the time. A provincial town is in search of a hero. A shell-shocked soldier downs vodka on his return from the frontline in Chechnya. As Ilya arrives home he stumbles into the epicentre of an extraordinary power struggle that threatens to tear the town apart. Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov's play The Drunks was first performed, in this English version by Nina Raine, by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2009. 'A maelstrom of corruption, egomania and lubricious booziness, rendered in spicily idiomatic English by Nina Raine' Evening Standard