THE GUARDIAN
Michael Billington Monday August 29, 2005
Russian National Mail - Old Red Lion
Ekaterinburg used to be famous as the
death-place of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Now, however,
it seems to be the chief birthplace of new Russian drama.
After Vassily Sigarev and the Presynakov brothers, all championed
by the Royal Court, along comes Oleg Bogaev: a strange,
eccentric, Gogolian talent here given his British premiere
by a new group called Sputnik Theatre.
Bogaev's hero is an ex-soldier and civil servant who now
lives in wretched poverty in a room piled high with yellowing
papers. His sole means of relieving his frustration is letter-writing.
However, since his correspondents include Lenin, Elizabeth
II, Vivien Leigh and Yuri Gagarin, it soon becomes clear
that he is engaged in a frantic dialogue with himself. In
the wilder stretches of his imagination, his correspondents
even talk to each other, so that the Bolshevik leader and
the British monarch argue ferociously over the rights to
his seedy apartment. The moral seems clear: life in modern
Russia is conducive to madness.
Although Bogaev's play is a piece of contemporary absurdism,
it also belongs to a long Russian literary tradition. If
Gogol comes to mind, it is because he was both an expert
on crazed solitude and an uncontrollable letter-writer:
he once wrote to a hated critic, after the death of his
wife: "Jesus Christ will help you become a gentleman - which
you are neither by education or inclination." Despite its
distinguished ancestry, Bogaev's play is admittedly incapable
of much dramatic development. It also wastes some of its
minor characters so that you never, as you might hope, see
Trotsky dialectically engaging with Lenin.
What Bogaev's play offers is a haunting image of desolation,
one that almost seems a metaphor for artistic creation:
what else does a writer do but give life to absent figures
through imaginary conversations? As director and translator,
Noah Birksted-Breen makes a profoundly Russian play accessible
to a western audience. Kevin McGonagle as the hero suggests
both the sadness and the occasional ecstasy of the epistolary
life, and Joseph Wicks and Leila Gray
do strenuous battle as Lenin and Lizzie.
An intriguing, hour-long curiosity.
