The Times August 31, 2005
Russian National Mail at the Old Red lion,
EC1
Sam Marlowe
IN
Travesties, Tom Stoppard brings together Lenin, James Joyce
and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara to debate political history.
For this hour-long absurdist drama, the Urals writer Oleg
Bogaev performs a comparable trick.
In the squalid flat he shared with his
postal-worker wife until her death, Ivan, a pensioner stricken
by poverty and isolation, writes a stream of letters. Some
are to old friends who have long ago forgotten him; but
most are to people he has never met: Queen Elizabeth II,
Vivien Leigh, Lenin, Trotsky, Gagarin, even some amiable
Martians. His scrawled epistles never make it out of his
paper-strewn home — and yet, mysteriously, replies
materialise, tucked in his dressing gown pocket or poking
out of a drawer. And when he sleeps, his correspondents
themselves appear, gathering around his rumpled bed —
not out of concern for Ivan’s welfare, but to squabble
over which of them gets to keep his apartment when he dies.
Bogaev shares a mentor with the playwrights Vassily Sigarev
and the Presnyakov brothers, and if Russian National Mail
is less successful than their output, it shares their bleak,
blackly humorous view of post-Soviet life. Ivan is filled
with impotent fury at the pitifully inadequate pension on
which he, a war veteran, is expected to live; and a scene
in which Elizabeth II and Lenin argue over him, the former
denigrating him as “a potato in a suit ” and
the latter claiming him as a casualty of capitalism, underlines
the way in which individuals are pawns in the game of politics.
The scramble for ownership of Ivan’s meagre possessions
is a grim irony and a grotesque insult to a comrade whose
suffering was a brick in the building of the now- crumbled
Communist state.
But while Noah Birksted-Breen’s Sputnik
Theatre production bubbles with ideas, it, and the play,
remain under- developed. A puppetry sequence in which Ivan’s
dying wife is portrayed by a fragile figure made of brown
paper with wooden-spoon arms, has a delicacy that is rarely
evident elsewhere. The motif of letter-writing is repetitive
and dramatically rather unexciting, and most of the famous
figures might as well be cardboard cut-outs for the use
Bogaev makes of them.
Birksted-Breen’s translation nicely
balances bitterness and wit, and Kevin McMonagle is an appealing
and affecting Ivan. But on this evidence, Bogaev’s
best work is still some way ahead of him.
