International Playwrights: Focus Russia - Reviews

BLACK MILK by Vassily Sigarev

JERWOOD THEATRE UPSTAIRS 31 January - 1 March 2003

Director: Simon Usher
Designer: Delia Peel
Lighting Designer: Simon Bennison
Sound Designer: Ian Dickinson
Cast: Di Botcher, Sarah Cattle, Gary Oliver, Paul Ready, Sheila Reid, Suzan Sylvester, Alan Williams
Crowd: Peggy Batchelor, Krisztina Erdelyi, Jon Huyton, Terry Jermyn, Geoffrey Lang, Linda Large, John Wordsworth

'A year ago Vassily Sigarev made a big impact with Plasticine: a dark, Dostoevskian study of a Urals urban hell. But, where that relied heavily on visceral shock, Sigarev's new play strikes me as an infinitely richer affair that blends a portrait of a marriage with a vivid picture of Russia's unending contradictions.

'Sigarev's setting is a railway station in a provincial hell-hole. And waiting for a non-arriving train are Levchik, a Moscow trader, and his heavily pregnant wife, Poppet, who have come to fleece the locals by selling them cheap Malaysian toasters. But Sigarev achieves an astonishing second act reversal by showing the young couple, 10 days later, still stuck in the same station: the key difference is that Poppet, having been delivered of her baby by a local midwife, wants to settle down in this rural backwater.

'What makes the play so exciting is its effortless mix of personal and social detail. On one level, it's an account of an abrasive modern marriage in which antagonism equal love and every endearment is spelt with four letters; and, just when you think Levchik is a total bastard, Sigarev upends all your assumptions by implying he may also be Poppet's protector. Through his portrait of two city slickers descending on the provinces, Sigarev also demonstrates Russia's perennial divisions: nothing is more moving than the sight of the locals come to protest about their useless toasters and being cowed by Levchiks brazen impudence.

'But the moving thing about the play, in Sasha Dugdale's translation, is that it feels both ancient and modern. Chekhov and Gorki might have recognised its image of a rural Russia in which there's not even a local hospital, though as the station ticket clerk revealingly remarks "there was a first aid post once". At the same time Sigarev offers a sardonic account of the new, post-communist Russia in which spivvery is rampant and in which, as Poppet claims: "It's trendy to hate and look down on everyone."

'Where Plasticine was dominated by its promenade style, here Simon Usher's Theatre Upstairs production captures exactly Sigarev's social nuances. Delia Peel's railway station is a masterpiece of decay. Paul Ready also suggests that Levchik's bullying bravado and rat-like cunning conceals an unarticulated love while Sarah Cattle's Poppet changes from metallic urban hard-heart to pallid rustic dreamer. Gary Oliver as an ineffectual hitman and Suzan Sylvester as the ticket clerk who is both exploiter and solicitous child carer confirm Sigarev's point that the contradictions in the Russian psyche remain eternal.

(Four Stars) Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN

The young Russian dramatist Vassily Sigarev, still only in his mid-twenties, arrived with a bang in Britain last year. His first play, Plasticine, a harrowing odyssey through the lower depths of contemporary Russia, received a stunning promenade production at the Royal Court and won Sigarev the Evening Standard's most promising playwright award.

Now he is back with a play that strikes me as even better. Plasticine was a great howl of despair about the brutality, injustice and corruption of contemporary Russia, and, though its nightmarish pessimism made for mesmerising theatre, it also seemed a touch facile. Black Milk, in contrast, explores a broader, subtler palette. It moves between harsh realism and flights of dramatic poetry, between gentle humour and thuggish violence. The characterisation is richer, and the play doesn't rule out the possibility of hope and redemption.

The action is set too deep in the heart - or is it the fundament? - of Russia, at a tiny rural station where only three trains stop each day. A narrator describes the cheerless run-down building, superbly realised in Delia Peel's design, with something of the beauty of a genre painting. And then, into this becalmed, benighted backwater come too lippy young Muscovites on the make.

Levchik and Poppet stagger into the station waiting room carrying laundry bags filled with dodgy toasters that they are flogging to the local yokels. They regard their mug punters with contempt, sneer at everything and though Poppet - who is eight months pregnant but smokes like a Stakhanovite whenever she isn't sucking a lollipop like a mardy child - seems merely sour and bitchy, her husband reveals a touch of the psychopath beneath his glib sales banter.

The clash of values - slow rural stolidity and suspicion vs city slicker money-grubbing - is hilariously caught, never more so than when a group of cowed villagers arrive clutching their tacky toasters and try to pluck up the courage to demand a refund.

But the play goes deeper than a modern Russian version of a coney-catching Jacobean comedy. When a boozed up communist arrives with a shotgun, pandemonium breaks out and Poppy goes into labour, screaming hysterically as an express train roars through the station.

The second half takes place 10 days later. Poppet is now the mother of a baby daughter, and we realise that this shallow, spiteful young woman has been transformed by motherhood, the kindness of the local community and a vision of God. The Russians have always been less nervous of writing about the life of the soul than we buttoned-up Brits, and though Poppet's spiritual experience may seem over-the-top to some, I found it both plausible and profoundly affecting. Unfortunately the odious Levchik is still on hand, determined to reclaim Poppet's soul for his own, and the play turns into a harrowing battle of wills.

Simon Usher directs a marvellously resonant and atmospheric production, as alert to the play's humour as he is to its deeper themes. Though largely naturalistic, the piece also comes over as a paradigm of the great divide between old and new Russia in the post-communist world, and the acting is outstanding.

Sarah Cattle beautifully captures Poppet's transformation, Paul Ready brings an edge of real terror to the stage as Levchik, and there is outstanding support from Suzan Sylvester as the garrulous ticket-office clerk, Sheila Reid as a dignified pensioner, Di Botcher as Poppet's delightful midwife and Gary Oliver, doubling as narrator and trigger happy drunk.

The Royal Court has discovered a tremendous new talent in Sigarev, and done him proud.

Charles Spencer, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

She to him: "You're a real git, you are." He to her: "I know." She, looking down at her midriff: "And I'm the one about to give birth to another one."

The scene is a railway station somewhere in provincial Russia. Levchik, a wheeler-dealer spiv, and his pregnant Poppet are waiting for a train, and they might almost as well be waiting for Godot. While they wait, things happen that make this Nowheresville now more frightening than we might have imagined, now more heartening. This is where she'll have to give birth. Isn't she just another git like Levchik? In fact, she's harder, less compassionate.

Until Act Two. The same place, 10 days later. Poppet, Levchik and their new baby are waiting for the train to take them back home. A local woman called Auntie Pasha is with them; she has helped Poppet to give birth and in the first arts of motherhood. Her simple kindness and generosity light up the play.

They light up Poppet, too. For her, this Nowheresville is no longer a hellhole, it's a Somewheresville, and it has brought some instinct for moral values back into her grim life. Because she smoked through her pregnancy, her child won't suckle from her, but she has hopes that, if she never smokes again, that will change.

She's wan, vulnerable, and she wants to stay here; she wants Levchik to invest their lives and money here. He is scornful. In the past 10 days, a man at this station has died of poisoned vodka; the ticket clerk has taken the blame and has attempted suicide. Whether Levchik or Poppet will depart is a battle that runs until the end of the play.

Different forms of pollution keep striking us to the end of the play, too, and add to its ambiguities and ambivalence. Levchik and Poppet, the predatory urban filth who corrupt the provinces; the locals who lie to the urban visitors and scare them with guns; the homemade vodka that kills; Poppet's own milk that her child won't drink.

Pollution is implicit in the play's title, Black Milk. The author, Vassily Sigarev, is also the author of Plasticine, the Royal Court production of which impressed many last year. Sigarev was born in 1977, and Black Milk would be compelling just as reportage on contemporary Russia by a new voice. It's remarkable for other reasons too. Both its acts work up to nightmare climaxes, and beyond the idea of pollution is also the possibility of redemption. Levchik can show charity to a poor widow. Poppet can become a good mother. Even milk that flows black can reflect the darkness and the light of the sky at night.

Sigarev is not a great playwright, and at times he's not a good one. The beginning and end of the play - both as written, and, differently, as performed - are too fancy. Act One in particular has creaky passages. There is an irritating loose end: whose vodka was poisonous? Sasha Dugdale, translating, and Simon Usher, directing, sometimes add to the creakiness. Yet mainly I want to congratulate Sigarev, Dugdale, Usher, and most of their actors, Di Botcher transforms the play as Auntie Pasha; and Sarah Cattle (Poppet) and, especially, Paul Ready (Levchik) rivetingly and accurately bring out the play's contrasts: hard/soft, kind/cruel. Corrupt/redeemable. It's so good to encounter a bright new voice from Russia that it's tempting to over-rate Sigarev, but already I applaud him with excitement.

Alastair Macaulay, FINANCIAL TIMES

TERRORISM by Vladimir and Oleg Presnyakov

JERWOOD THEATRE UPSTAIRS 10 - 29 March 2003

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Director: Ramin Gray
Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer: Johanna Town
Sound Designers: Emma Laxton, Ian Dickinson
Assistant Director: Bijan Sheibani
Cast: Di Botcher, Sarah Cattle, Ian Dunn, Paul Hilton, Gary Oliver, Paul Ready, Sheila Reid, Suzan Sylvester, Alan Williams

A play with this title has an obvious resonance right now. But the extraordinary thing about this deft and brilliant piece by Siberia's Presnyakov Brothers is the way it extends the definition of "terrorism" to embrace most of modern Russian life. Structurally, the play is rather like violent version of La Ronde; tonally, its mood of dazzling apocalyptic farce suggests the novels of Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller.

The action starts, in Hildegard Bechtler's ingenious design, with a simulated airport bomb-scare, to which the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs audience becomes a helpless witness. And although the next scene, involving sadistically adulterous love-play with a woman shackled to a bedpost, initially seems like a sudden jump-cut, we soon work out the hidden connection. In fact, each of the play's six scenes, including an office-suicide and infighting amongst the city's military police, appears to be a discrete demonstration of terrorism: the artfulness lies in the incremental portrait of a world in which abnormality had become the norm.

What is startling, however, is the surreal humour that these two brothers bring to their task. You see this at its wildest in the third scene, where it is discovered that on office-worker has hanged herself in the relaxation room: an event that is treated more as an irritant than a tragedy, especially by the resident psychologist who can't get at the dog leash he desperately needs. Even the shocking revelation, in a later scene, that the bomb-disposal police are voyeuristic accident-perverts is capped by the bizarre detail of their boss crooning Happy Birthday, Mr President in the style of Marilyn Monroe.

This is a play about the breakdown of society in contemporary Russia. What astonishes is the cool, sardonic wit that the Presnyakov brothers bring to their task. And this is beautifully realised in Sasha Dugdale's translation and in Ramin Gray's poker-faced production. Instead of treating the characters as Gogolian grotesques, Gray assumes that violence is now an everyday fact of Russian life.

Thus in one scene Di Botcher and Sheila Reid play two old biddies sitting on a playground bench; and the casualness with which the former passes the latter some poison-tablets to despatch her son-in-law speaks volumes. Even in the bedroom scene there is something disturbingly nonchalant about the way Paul Hilton transforms the erotic games he is playing with Suzan Sylvester's trussed-up victim into a dangerous reality. And Alan Williams as both the dog-petting psychologist and the singing military policeman makes the absurd seem hilariously plausible. Russian society may be in disarray, but, on the evidence of this and the recent work of Vassily Sigarev, a sense of dislocation yields first-rate drama.

THE GUARDIAN

They tell me that Terrorism was written before 9/11, and long before the Moscow Theatre siege, but its two Russian authors, who trade by the name of the Presnyakov Brothers, have certainly written a timely piece. Even the fragmented, erratic form adds to the feel of a world about to blow up - or be blown up by forces nobody can quite identify.

When you enter the Theatre Upstairs you aren't shown straight to your seat because some are fenced off by police tape, others are occupied by bored-looking people with their baggage and the auditorium is being patrolled by armed militiamen.

We're in an airport. Flights are indefinitely delayed because suitcases have been found on the runway and must be checked for explosives. As the unorthodox opening to Ramin Gray's briskly acted production emphasises, this is the sort of thing that happens in Britain, too.

Anyway, Ian Dunn's Passenger - all the names are vague, general, international - decides to go home to his wife. "What sort of life do we live?" he asks. "You don't feel safe anywhere now, only at home." But as we discover after we're seated, that's a highly optimistic assessment. Bombs sit in hearts as well as suitcases. Terror and terrorism take many forms, little and large, private ands public. Evil leads to evil: the daisy-chain of the era of the daisy-cutter.

I'm not sure that the Presnyakovs are as intellectually trenchant or coherent as they would wish, but they write tough, quirky dialogue and create a succession of striking scenes. Thinking her husband is away on a plane, a man called Man ties up a woman called Woman and has desultory sex with her. A gloating old racist gives her grim old friend poisonous tablets to feed to her "ethnic" son-in-law. So to the changing room in a military copshop, where the narratives strands come together.

What did Dunn's Passenger do when he reached home? What was that hissing sound when Paul Hilton's layabout Man humped Suzan Sylvester's edgy, tearful Woman? What happened when Shiela Reid and Di Botcher as those old crones chased the former's disobedient grandson up through a block of flats? Enough to say that the soldiers have returned to headquarters with photos of severed limbs after investigating a huge gas explosion that probably wasn't caused by political terrorists.

I've seldom seen a play that took so much for granted that violence and danger are endemic, deeply entrenched. The soldiers viciously bully each other, as Russian soldiers notoriously do. A man is said to have put down his dog by throwing it from a balcony. There's a suicide in a tough, nasty office. Passengers in business class talk casually, wryly of fire, doom and death. This is Putin's Moscow.

Maybe it's Blair's Britain.

THE TIMES

Just as Britain seems to be turning its back on the Continent, the theatre is welcoming it in. And nowhere more than the Royal Court, which almost monthly comes up with new names.

In what may be a theatrical first, the latest Court playwrights are billed without forenames, as if they were a singing duo or a shop: the Presnyakov Brothers from Siberia. And their play is a first, too: a bitter, funny, penetrating look at the toxic effects of living with fear. Terrorism isn't about victims or perpetrators or one savage act. It's a series of takes on a society broken by horror and suspicion, turning against itself.

Dislocation is everywhere in Ramin Gray's strong production. Hildegard Bechtler's warehouse design - with brick walls, iron girder and chalk marks on the floor exposed - creates new scenes by bringing on a puny wall or a set of chairs, so that characters perch like refugees amid a hall of empty space. At first the episodes seem completely disconnected. A man is caught in a bomb alert at an airport; a woman is tied up by her lover, who spins into a brilliant imaginative riff about one bit of his body terrorizing another. A group of soldiers in charge of quelling attacks on the state fall among themselves. Slowly the links between the incidents become apparent - and as they do, they become more unexpected: everyone suspects plots when there aren't any and fails to notice plans that are laid; no one can cope with the idea of accidents. Terrorism shrugs off more ideas in quarter of an hour's wit than most political debating plays do in an evening.

THE OBSERVER

The Presnyakov Brothers, from Siberia, open their play in an airport. The audience are the passengers, waiting for the airport to open: there's been a bomb alert. Nothing happens, and eventually the situation defuses. Until the next time.

Terrorism loosely links five different snapshots of contemporary Russia. A man ties a woman to a bed and goes to sleep. A woman hangs herself in a restroom. Two policemen lock up a colleague in a locker; one takes photos of limbs torn apart in an explosion. None is a terrorist, but all inflict or experience terror. Terrorism is no longer simply political: it's social and personal too, running through people like a fuse.

Director Ramin Gray enhances the play's widescreen feel by ingeniously moving the action around the stage. He never sensationalises its themes, deflecting instead the casual brutality, hysteria and paranoia through absurd humour, deadpan responses and blank silences.

The play could be tighter, but the performances from the ensemble have an unusual and uncanny rhythm. This is a quietly shocking portrait of a society unravelling from within.

METRO