Male Desire and Addiction: Martin Algus’s Play hits the stage, “Pagina Tre”, May 17 2026

https://paginatre.it/desiderio-maschile-e-dipendenze-in-scena-il-testo-di-martin-algus/

“Something Real is the debut novel, published in 2018 by the Estonian actor, playwright, and screenwriter Martin Algus, on the theme of loneliness and people’s ever-growing dependence on virtual reality, brought to the stage as a mise en espace by the Ravenna-based company Studio Doiz as part of the latest edition of POLIS Teatro Festival, at the Rasi Theatre in Ravenna.

A noir thriller that opens on the condition of existential and relational dissatisfaction of two diametrically opposed men, who alternate on stage with their unsettling monologues. The first (played by Alessandro Renda), a failed architect, loving father, wife no longer attractive, who starts to take refuge in erotic websites out of boredom, within a short time finds himself entangled in an out-of-control addiction to pornography and acts of masturbation in the workplace that cost him his dismissal.

The other (played by Lorenzo Carpinelli), is a man recently released from prison who begins a relationship with an alcoholic woman and a pre-teen daughter whom he has no qualms about using as bait on a website to attract pedophile clients, trap them with compromising photos and enrich himself.

[…] The gripping plot, told by two voices on stage, without any filter, toned down only at times by irony, is directed by Jacopo Gardelli with skill in making the two characters mirrors of each other. As he explained at the press conference presenting the Festival in recent days “the text speaks in a non-rhetorical way about male sexual desire, but in Algus’s text, who is one of the most appreciated playwrights in Estonia, as in many authors coming from ex-Soviet countries, one feels above all the theme of the loss of identity. Both characters are in fact looking for something real, they are two solitudes talking to each other”.