There’s more than one spectre haunting Ivan Sidorovich Zhukov
in this one-character play. Old Karl will be dancing in
his grave. The revolution has come and gone, but contemporary
playwright Oleg Bogaev’s take on what’s left makes for an
unsettling snapshot of post-Soviet society. The Russian’s
absurdist brand of humour has won him plaudits back home.
The Sputnik Theatre production is the UK premiere of a new
translation by Noah Birksted-Breen. Bogaev was still a twinkle
in his mother’s eye when space cowboy Yuri Gagarin in beat
the Yanks to the Cosmos, but the Soviet hero is one of the
ghosts at this feast of darkly nihilistic humour. Of course,
Lenin turns up too, and Trotsky.
So does Vivien Leigh and even Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth
II. By an uncanny feat of good timing, there is also a real-life
Martian, taking advantage of Earth’s proximity to the Red
Planet. They are conjured up as Ivan Sidorovich ponders
his predicament – a Great Patriotic War veteran, alone,
penniless, depressed, trapped in a crummy bedsit, with nothing
but bed bugs and a battered accordion for company.
Instead, he writes letters to the people on his spectral
birthday party guest list – and they actually reply. This
artifice could have been as wrist-slashingly gloomy as a
Leonard Cohen ballad were it not for the outrageously surreal
flashes of absurdist comic introspection and dialogue. The
play is held together brilliantly by Kevin McMonagle as
Ivan, who has the monumental task of convincing you of a
mind on the edge of madness. Bogaev is holding up his mirror
to post-Soviet society, but the play will also resonate
with the tenants of Camden’s crumbling tower blocks who
are still refusing to sell out to the honeyed bribes of
New Labour’s housing utopia.
Lonely and deprived people of the world – unite.
25/08/2005, Camden New Journal
