Theatre – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

TEARS OF A CLOWN: An iconoclastic revival of the British play LOOK BACK IN ANGER by Ermolova Theatre.

John Osborne’s classic is often seen as a play of dissent concerning class differences and religious hypocrisy. How would such a play fare in Russia’s stifled atmosphere?

For some it was Catcher in the Rye, for me it was Look Back in Anger. That is to say a piece of writing which captured us in our youth and never let us go.

In my case this seems quite hard to account for. The seventeen-year-old that caught a revival of the play on the radio one summer was not working-class, nor a jazz fan, was not married nor in love and – at that time! – was not living in a flat in the Midlands.

It was the play’s double whammy of tone and eloquence that cut through.

Against all odds.

Look Back In Anger constitutes the third stage play by a 27 year old London touring actor called John Osborne. It was a domestic melodrama and the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square took it on in 1956 whereupon it was met with a polite disavowal – that is until one Kenneth Tynan, an influential critic from The Observer newspaper penned an enthused description of it as a generation defining piece. Then a TV showing of some of it followed and a new audience flooded in to see the whole thing. The play has been viewed as representing a stylistic trendsetter – towards greater contemporary realism and outspokenness on certain issues ever since. The play even made it to Moscow a year later. The role of Jimmy Porter – the so called `Angry Young Man` – has since become a popular script used for auditions for aspiring young male thespians.

So how would a Russian theatre of the twenty twenties serve up this hoary old classic to a Russian theatregoer?

The great adaptors.

A visible presence on Tverskaya street these last several years, Ermolova theatre was set up in 1933 and was named after the revered actress Maria Nikolaeva Ermolova (1853 – 1928). Today, the role of artistic director is filled by Oleg Menshikov (the military father in the films Attraction and Invasion). Under his auspices the company seems to be pushing at the boundaries somewhat. At the time of writing they are showing a rendering of Glukhovsky’s Text and also something called Russian Psycho which is not from the film of the same name but a tribute to Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. Indeed, some of their reworkings of established drama standards have discomfited audiences and critics alike – and Oglyanis Vo Gneve (Look Back In Anger) is nothing if not an established drama standard.

Nothing is sacred.

The clearest rupture with the original play is the defiance of naturalism. With its dinghy one room flat and above all, its ironing board, Look Back In Anger brought the punch of realism to an audience that had grown accustomed to mannered performances which wee at several removes from the worlds they lived in themselves.

In this revival, nevertheless, we discover the players in a rather commodious and stylish abode. There are wall lamps fixed to the walls and what can only be called French windows at the back of the stage (those emblems of pre-`Kitchen sink` theatre!) Old black and white antique looking pictures are festooned around the place and there are cushions on the floor. This is no bedsit in a Midlands town (although it might serve as a symbolic comment on the attachment to an Edwardian past that bedevils Jimmy).

Then – in a nod to Osborne’s subsequent play The Entertainer – the action gets interrupted by the arrival onstage of a clown- costumed Jazz troupe who seem to comment on the proceedings with their songs. This theatre of the Absurd-cum-circus element represents a thoroughgoing new realization of the play.

Misfit.

Resplendent in bright yellow socks, Andrei Martinev, who plays Jimmy Porter portrays him as very much the romantic-poetic archetype (his mannerisms put me in mind of the young Anthony Andrews). It was difficult to see this oddball adolescent as any kind of generational spokesman, however, still less imagine him running a sweet stall. His loyal sidekick Cliff Lewis – played by Makar Karyagin -is chunky, with blonde-haired clean-living looks that together with his braces make him look like a preppy young American more than a Welsh scruff. He spends a lot of time plucking guitar strings and bursting into song.

Not only is this version of the play vaudevillian in this way but it also seemed to be afflicted with ADHD! The players always had to be doing something as they spoke – unpacking something, fiddling with something – the script was never enough. There was also a fair bit of distracting drumming on tables with it all.

Stuck with the essentials.

What the production remained faithful to was the bare bones of the plot. Jimmy is a malcontent who is married to Alison (Polina Sinilnikova) , a woman from a higher class background than himself (this providing material for him to taunt her with) and Cliff is the more straightforward Welsh working-class friend who looks on as their marriage seems to teeter on the edge.

Enter into this `menagerie` Alison’s actress friend, the more dynamic Helena, come to stay for a week. Regarding her as a `natural enemy` Jimmy clashes with her, but not before she has arranged for his wife (who we learn earler is pregnant) to flee the scene.

Jimmy and Helena, in the classic attraction of opposites, fall into each other’s arms leaving a dismayed Cliff to also later vacate the household. All seems blissful, until the return of Alison, minus the baby….

All of that was there but the dialogue had been shuffled around and some scenes seemed to have been hollowed out: Cliff nursing Alison after she has burnt her arm on the iron, Jimmy shouting at the church bells and the final reconciliation scene between Jimmy and Alison.

It was disconcerting to find that Jimmy and Alison’s game of bears and squirrels – the very thing that keeps their relationship alive in tense – moments had gone. So had Jimmy’s pipe smoking (although we do see a cheeky reference to it when Alison momentarily has one in her mouth). Most of all, the visit from Alison’s father – Colonel Redfern -had been cut, leaving no one to counterpoint all the bohemian chaos.

The stand off between Jimmy and Helena however not only remained but had been placed at the centre of this piece and was played to dramatic perfection. Osbone gained a reputation as a `misogynist`, but the fact remains that he wrote some great roles for women and Helena Charles is one of them. Veronkia Safonova projected a credible take on her as a statuesque, Amazonian Alpha-girl and it was not difficult to envisage how even a despiser of phonies like Jimmy could succumb to her charms.

Overall, this production made the play less like a one-man show than more faithful versions of Look Back In Anger have seemed.

What does it mean here?

The stress on this play was somewhat on the `affairs of the hearts` end of things and it was all viewed through a veil of sadness and tears. What of the sociopolitical undercurrent that made the play notorious? What would a – say – manager from Yugo Zapadnaya – make of the depiction of life in a Midlands town in the Fifties? Or of the subtle, but all too real, distinctions between Working and middle-class culture? Or of Cliff’s Welshness? Or of the mention of Britain’s former imperial role in India?

All of this would be somewhat hard to translate into Modern Muscovite but what would not be lost on a contemporary Russian is the ethos of anticlericalism and antimilitarism that runs through this play.

Likewise, as a man born out of his time and unable to find anything the present scene to fire up his ideals, Jimmy Porter could be viewed as a Superfluous Man, if there ever were one. I am not so sure if anything of this came out in this production though.

Overcooked.

The acting was strenuous but the overall aesthetic was camp, without being effete. Osborne himself might even have approved. However, the `anything-goes` approach to the staging left us with something cluttered and frenetic, with the cabaret aspects of it detracting from the theatrical tension. Sound-wise, there seemed to be too many scores vying for our attention: Jazz, chanson and modern classical.

Osborne’s plays often seem to ruffle people’s feathers. These spectators left bemused and maybe a little dazed but not otherwise indignant. I did, however, notice a lack of laughter (for this is a funny play, for most British people). It might be telling that the only appreciative chuckle came when a theatrical joke was made about passing Lady Bracknell the cucumber sandwiches.

For myself I was just as unsettled as when I watched a play calling itself A Clockwork Orange a few years back. Their production set my mind into gear, however, and I am still processing it all.

Lead image: Ermolva.ru

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (ZAVODNOI APPELSIN) at the Theatre of Nations, Moscow November 20th

O my brothers! I viddied a bezoomny horrorshow about a malenky bit of the old ultraviolence!

The play calling itself `A Clockwork Orange` (`Zavodnoi Appelsin`) seems to have become a permanent fixture in the schedules of Moscow’s Theatre of Nations. My previous attempts to get tickets for it had failed and this evening, courtesy of a whole load of thirty-somethings, was a full house.
I need to say at the outset that what I saw was very much a conceptual spin-off from Anthony Burgess’s sensational novel of 1962 and by no means an adaptation of it, or even of Stanley Kubrick’s much vaunted 1971 screen rendering of the same. Instead this functioned as an original idea by the writers Yuriy Klavdiev and Ilia Kukharenko with the director Fillip Grigoryan. After all, the novel is unstageable (as I can testify having sat through a lame attempt to do do by drama students many years ago). The drama really concerns the genesis of the novel A Clockwork Orange and in that it resembles Ken Russel’s film Gothic (1986) which tells of how Frankenstein came to be written.
As much as this fact disconcerted me, I never got bored throughout this 1 hour 50 minute (without intermissions) production, and that is despite my less than perfect Russian language skills. Rather, I left the theatre feeling perplexed and remain so now. My only disappointment lay in not being shown the sinister glitter of a brave new world that the novel offers. The play glances back to the past.

The Moscow Connection.
Still, if you live in Moscow you already inhabit the world of A Clockwork Orange: the blocks of flats whose windows are illuminated by the flickering light of TV sets, the bars with names like `The Duke of New York`, the superannuated murals glorifying labour, the vast public video screens – not all of these are in Burgess’s story, but might as well have been.
There exists a deeper link to Russia’s capital too. Malcolm McDowell (the iconic Alex in Kubrick’s film) told of how Burgess, before writing the novel, had been on an exchange visit to Moscow. He was sitting in a coffee bar one warm evening when a group of learing thugs pressed their faces against the window (Newspunch.com, February 4th 2016). This vignette provided a catalyst for Burgess’s story and also its telling via `nadstat`, the teenage slang full of Russian loan words.

Burgess’s demon.
There was another inspiration to the novel however, and this play zooms in on it. What happened was that Burgess’s wife was assaulted, in Burgess’s absence, by American G.I’s. Many critics have hypothesised that A Clockwork Orange represented Burgess’s attempt to come to terms with the trauma that this terrible event wrought on him.
The main protagonist of the play is a Burgess-like `writer` (characterised as a beret wearing member of the intelligentsia). The incident is represented – borrowing a sequence from the novel -by the rape of his wife in a country house setting.
It is an ordinary miscreant who ends up behind bars who conjures up the demon of the `imaginary Alex` by throwing the writer into helpless introspective guilt.
Otherwise the play features the stand-off between Youth and Age (but fails to explore this in the sociological way that Burgess attempted) and there is a bit of rumination on popular culture (sixties pop music plays a big role in this production).
As for the nadstat: I had been eager to see how a Russian language production would deal with this but drew a blank. In the stage notes to the play there is an intriguing suggestion that the script used Google translate to create the feel of an artificial language, but this was lost on this Russian learner.
Sixties retro.

The set comprises a moderne country house, the inside of which we view from the garden, courtesy of a wall length sliding window. There is some attention to the detail of sixties Britain with the wife, for example, being clad in one of the flowing skirts of the period (I was reminded of the recent British play Home, I’m Darling where a couple try to recreate late fifties domesticity). We also encounter a Britishism in the form of a garden gnome. How stunned we are when this comes to life and begins to address the audience!
You would expect a bit of the old ultraviolence to get a look in too. It does. The rape sequence is prolonged and distasteful, but not cheapened with any attempt at eroticism. The most disturbing scene, however, is the grievous bodily harm committed on Alex by his elders. (It appears that theatre censorship in Russia is not as stringent as all that).

Fresh take.
There is little point in trying to give you the `plot` of this play. This is an expressionistic trip through vaudevillian sequences held together by a Strindbergian dream logic. Or to put it another way it is a bit like what you might have got if Andrei Tarkovsky rather than Kubrick had directed a film version of the novel.
In fact, the only Kubrick influence in the play comes via his film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) in the use of a Ligeti like score as the plays opening. The only iconic reference to the film occurs when Alex is given a drink of moloko (milk) by his parents.
Also we get an extended dumb show in which the writer’s wife, masked by sinister facial bandages, mimes to a sixties ballad and a surreal scene where the `imaginary Alex` turns up to the house in the form of a cyborg Black Knight – only to morph into the couple’s querulous teenage son. Later there is also a home video where Alex’s parents torture him.
Throughout there is a determination not to feel predictable or to fall into clichés. Even when Beethoven gets an airing, it is the gentler Beethoven of `The Moonlight Sonata` and not the more rousing works associated with the Kubrick film. (As I often bewail the derivative or stodgy nature of much modern Russian culture I cannot really complain about this!)
In any case, this play may be iconoclastic but it is not at all irreverent. The writers have demonstrated much concern here for the life and times of Anthony Burgess. Nor have they made the theme of violence a titillating one.
You might even see this play as something of a black comedy, although the fact that the audience did not so much as titter might owe to the fact that, like me, they would need some time to mull the whole thing over.
If you imagine that modern Russian theatre is all revivals of The Cherry Orchard then wake up and nyuhakh the kofye!

Theatre of Nations site (English).

The Scary Fairy Tales of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

The Grand Old Lady of Russian letters has some weird tales to tell.

Nina had always been a disorganised person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go `freelance` and the apparent total unravelling of her life…. She ate, she drank…and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

`Who is he? ` I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there….

For all the reputation for `chauvinism` that still sticks to Russian society, the fact remains that one of its most revered authors is a woman, an elderly woman at that. Moreover, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is neither a veteran critic of Soviet repression like a Solhenitzyn, nor someone exulting in the shiny new capitalism like a Sergey Minaev. As such, this writer, playwright and novelist can offer the Western reader a fresh take on how a great many Russians really think and feel.

Amongst the nation’s best-known contemporary writers, Petrushevskaya cuts a figure of a sort of literary godmother. From her thirties this Muscovite has been producing stories and plays and following a long period of being disregarded came to prominence in the 1980s when her dramas – compared by some to Harold Pinter’s -were seen as fit to be performed. Then as she reached fifty her first book of short stories saw print in Russia.

Now these tales have been translated into English by two Americans, Ann Summers – a Slavic literature academic – and the Moscow born Keith Gessen, founder of `n+1` magazine. Penguin Modern classics have collected them under the title There Once Was A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby which hit the shelves in 2009.

This collection is made up of 19 short tales grouped into four categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems and Fairy Tales. They defy easy categorisation but the tag `magical realism` is a hard one to avoid. Readers who have encountered Vladimir Sorokin might also be reminded of him, but her work relies less on shock tactics.

To a British reader they offer not such a great challenge as similar developments occurred in British fiction in the same general period. I am thinking of The Cement Garden period Ian Mc Ewan (or `Ian Macabre` as he was then sometimes dubbed) as well as the Gothic fantasias of Angela Carter.

Petrushevskaya tells us of women, married couples and families who undergo strange life and death situations. Some of these invoke the supernatural, others can be accounted for in terms of psychology but in all cases individual experience is paramount. Whilst Petrushevskaya avoids local and historical references it is clear that it is the seedy apartments of the Russia of the Eighties to the present day that she is showing us.

Two of her stories – `Hygiene` and the infamous `The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century` function as sketches of dystopian catastrophe. In the former, for example, a man who has recovered from a mystery plague knocks on the door of a family apartment to warn them of the coming social collapse. This does indeed occur but the family survives through robbery, although end up having to quarantine their own daughter.

Others such as `The God Poseidon` (quoted from above) and `The Black Coat` can be enjoyed as supernatural chillers. It would not be difficult to imagine them being anthologised in the more thoughtful type of Horror collection sandwiched between Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. (Indeed Petrushevskaya won a World Fantasy award for this book in 2009).

`There is Someone in the House` however, suggests a study in morbid psychology whereas `Marllena`s Secret` is a bold fantasia and `My Love` an extended exercise in tragic pathos.

Her prose is spare but with enough observant detail to bring some reality to her fables. The fast paced narrative is told by an earthy and unsentimental voice, which is matter-of-fact, and without overt humour. The resulting effect – pithy and sensational- resonates in the West as much as it does in Russia. She has been on the New York Times bestseller list.

Petrushevskaya casts a flamboyant figure, dressing like a grand dame and singing cabaret. From not being able to get published in her own country at all she has become its national treasure, an icon of survival.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers is published by the Penguin Group (London: 2009)

(The above quotation is from p-85, `The God Poseidon`).