Igor Golyak | The Wanderers

The highly anticipated UK premiere of Anna Ziegler's The Wanderers has arrived at London's Marylebone Theatre until 29th November 2025. The Wanderers interweaves two parallel marriages separated by a generation - one is set in the 1970s in the Hasidic Jewish community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The other is contemporary (a “secular” Jewish marriage) in modern‐day Brooklyn and as the play unfolds, it gradually reveals how their lives connect. We spoke with Director Igor Golyak to tell us more.

Q) Hello Igor. Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions today. Before we begin, please could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background as a theatre director and what it was about theatre that inspired you to make this your career?

Thank you for having me. I am Igor Golyak, and like many who came of age in the former Soviet Union, theatre was not simply a career choice—it was a necessity, a breath. I was born in Kyiv, trained at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts, and later found myself in America, where I founded Arlekin Players Theatre in Boston.

What drew me to theatre? It is the same thing that keeps me there: the human soul in all its mystery. Theatre is not entertainment—it is a ritual, a confession, a place where we strip away the masks we wear in daily life and confront what remains. In theatre, we do not escape reality; we enter it more deeply. This is what I learned from the great masters, from Stanislavsky to Grotowski—that theatre must be a living, breathing organism, not a museum piece.

Q) What first drew you to Anna Ziegler's The Wanderers, and what excites you most about bringing it to London audiences?

The Wanderers spoke to me immediately because it is about the most fundamental human condition: longing. Not just for love or connection, but for meaning itself—for a story that makes sense of our existence. Anna has written something rare: a play that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally devastating. It asks: Are we the authors of our own lives, or are we characters in someone else's imagination?

This question haunts me. As a Ukranian Jew who left his homeland, who carries multiple languages and multiple worlds inside him, I understand what it means to wander—literally and metaphorically. To search for home, for identity, for the story that explains why we are here.

London audiences, I believe, will recognize this. They understand melancholy. They understand the space between what is said and what is felt. This is theatre for those who are not afraid to look inward.

Q) The play blurs reality and fiction — characters emerge from a novelist's imagination and interact with his lived world. How have you tackled that visually and theatrically in your staging?

The key is not to explain. The moment you try to make clear what is "real" and what is "imagined," you kill the poetry. Life itself does not announce when it becomes dream. Memory does not arrive with subtitles.

So we work with atmosphere, with light and shadow, with the way a body moves through space. The stage becomes a landscape of the mind—sometimes solid, sometimes liquid. We use minimalist elements that suggest rather than define. A window that leads nowhere and everywhere. A table that might be in three different apartments simultaneously.

The actors must inhabit this ambiguity with complete conviction. They are not playing "characters in a book" versus "real people." They are playing human beings caught in the fundamental uncertainty of existence. This is closer to Chekhov than to metafiction—the question is not "what is real?" but "what is true?"

Q) Anna Ziegler has said the play is about "connection and how fragile and surprising it can be" How have you emphasised that fragility and surprise in your direction?

Through silence. Through the space between words. Through the moment when a hand reaches out and stops, uncertain, in midair.

I have trained my actors to listen—truly listen—to each other. Not to perform listening, but to be vulnerable to the other person's presence. When connection happens in this play, it must feel like something breaking open, like ice cracking on a frozen lake in spring. There is always danger in it. Always risk.

We work very much with tempo-rhythm, as Stanislavsky taught. A scene may begin with great distance between people, and then suddenly—through a gesture, a confession, a shared memory—the distance collapses. But it can collapse again just as quickly. This is the fragility Anna speaks of. We are always one word away from solitude.

And surprise? Surprise comes when we stop performing our expected roles. When the Orthodox Jewish woman reveals her secret longings. When the novelist discovers he has written a truth he didn't know he possessed. These moments must land like small earthquakes.

Q) At its heart, the play asks whether we can ever escape the stories we've inherited. How do you personally connect to that question?

(A pause, as if looking at something far away)

I carry my homeland inside me like an old photograph I cannot throw away. I carry the weight of Jewish history, of pogroms and wandering, of stories told by my grandmother in a language that is disappearing. I carry the expectations of what a "Eastern European director" should be—what a "Jewish artist" should say.

Can I escape these stories? No. But perhaps I can transform them. This is the artist's only real freedom: not to escape our inheritance, but to reimagine it. To take the old scripts—of religion, of nationality, of family—and to ask: What if? What if I could rewrite this ending? What if this character made a different choice?

The novelist in The Wanderers discovers that his characters have their own will, their own longings beyond what he intended. This is also true in life. We are not free from our stories, but perhaps the stories are not finished with us yet. There are pages still being written.

Q) Can you give us a little insight into how you've collaborated with the creative team to bring your vision to life?

Theatre is not dictatorship—this I learned from watching directors who failed. Yes, there must be a vision, but it must breathe, it must be permeable.

From the beginning, I told my designers: we are creating a world where interior and exterior collapse into each other. Where a Brooklyn apartment and a Jerusalem apartment and the space of imagination all coexist. My set designer understood immediately—we needed architecture that feels both concrete and metaphysical. Real furniture, but arranged in ways that suggest the logic of dreams.

With lighting, we work very intimately. Light is not just illumination—it is thought, it is memory, it is G-d watching. Sometimes a character should be lit as if from within, sometimes from a source we cannot see. This creates the sense that forces beyond our understanding are shaping what we witness.

And with my collaborators, we have had many long conversations about what can remain unspoken. Anna is generous—she trusts that theatre can say things her words alone cannot. Some of the most powerful moments in this production happen in silence, in gesture, in the actor's eyes.

Q) The cast includes Anna Popplewell, Katerina Tannenbaum, Alexander Forsyth, Paksie Vernon, and Eddie Toll. How has the rehearsal process been with this ensemble, and what unique qualities do they each bring to the production?

They are extraordinary. Each one brings a different kind of courage.

What I ask of actors is not easy: to be absolutely present, absolutely vulnerable, absolutely true—while simultaneously holding the awareness that they may be fictional constructs. This could become a cerebral exercise, but they have found the emotional core.

We spend much time in rehearsal simply sitting, talking about longing, about faith, about the stories we tell ourselves to survive. I ask them about their own inherited narratives—what did their parents tell them about who they should be? Where do they feel like wanderers in their own lives?

Then we take these confessions and we transform them, through technique, into the characters' journeys. But the emotional truth remains. You can see it in their eyes, in the way their bodies carry the weight of accumulated losses and unspoken desires.

Each actor brings a different texture: one brings fierce intelligence, another brings a kind of luminous fragility, another brings the heaviness of tradition, the burden and comfort of it. Together, they create a tapestry of human searching.

Q) Marylebone Theatre is an intimate space. How does the venue itself shape the experience you want audiences to have?

Intimacy is everything for this play. In a large theatre, you can hide. In a small space, you cannot. The audience cannot remain observers—they become implicated, they become witnesses, they become almost participants in these characters' private moments.

I want the audience to feel they are overhearing something they shouldn't—a marriage in crisis, a novelist's confession, a woman's secret rebellion against the life prescribed for her. In Marylebone, there is nowhere to escape. The discomfort is important. The proximity is important.

This is the theatre I believe in: not spectacle at a distance, but communion. The Greeks understood this—theatre as a sacred space where we gather to witness human suffering and human hope. A small theatre brings us back to this ancient purpose.

Q) What emotions or questions do you hope audiences will be carrying with them as they leave the theatre? Why should audiences come along?

I hope they leave unsettled. Not disturbed, but... opened. Like a door in their mind that was closed has now been pushed slightly ajar, and they cannot quite close it again.

I hope they ask themselves: What is the story I tell myself about my life? Is it true? Is it the only possible story? And perhaps most importantly: Have I been living, or have I been performing a role someone else wrote for me?

Why come? Because theatre—real theatre, not just entertainment—is one of the last places in our distracted, fragmented world where we practice deep attention. For two hours, you cannot check your phone, you cannot scroll, you cannot escape. You must be present to other human beings struggling with the same questions that keep you awake at night.

The Wanderers offers no easy answers. It offers something better: recognition. The feeling of seeing yourself reflected in the yearnings of strangers. This is what we need now—not more noise, but more truth. Not more certainty, but more honest questioning.

Come because you are also a wanderer. Come because you, too, are searching for connection in a world that makes it almost impossible. Come because theatre, at its best, reminds us that we are not alone in our loneliness.

(A slight pause, a gentle smile)

And come because, in the end, we are all stories trying to understand the story we are in. This play invites you to witness that universal struggle with compassion, with poetry, with the understanding that the search itself—not the arrival—is what makes us human.

The Wanderers plays at Marylebone Theatre until 29th November 2025.

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Rehearsal Photography by Mark Senior