There’s a good play out there about a Russian theatre guy forced to leave his country for America in 2022, and finding that everything over there is just as censored and ghastly as it is back home, only in a different way. Sadly, this isn’t really it. But while its creator and director Alexander Molochnikov’s raucous show (written with Eli Rarey) about his travails is frantic, loud, a bit too pleased with itself, and generally feels rather like having hyperactive children shouting (and singing) telegrams at you for two hours in revue fashion, it is also for the most part not boring — and how often can you say that in London theatre?
The ingredients are promising. Our main man, Kon, played by Daniel Boyd as an engagingly naïve type with floppy hair very like Molochnikov’s, is a fashionable young theatre whizz rehearsing Chekhov’s Seagull at the venerable Moscow Arts Theatre, with his old mum playing Arkadina, what’s more, leading to some fun mirroring of art and life. But the good old days of extravagant theatrical freedom — a genuine thing through the first fifteen years of President Putin’s tenure — are coming to an end, politics are descending on the Russian arts world yet again like a vampiric spider, and the show is emasculated in rehearsals. In practice this seems to mean that some chaps dancing around in skirts may be thought a bit risqué in the new patriotic atmosphere, but when the invasion of Ukraine actually happens, Kon skips out, leaving his assistant Anton (Elan Zafir as the Eeyorish conscience of the setup) to oversee the opening, where he makes a poorly-judged anti-war speech to the audience, with baleful consequences.
Over in New York, Kon finds himself demoted from celebrity to off-off-Broadway, rehearsing in an empty office space, with experimentalist actors who’d rather be doing The Three Little Piggies or an “immersive Medea” and who are variously triggered and traumatised by every line of the Chekhov — but again this potential theatrical lark is more hinted at than shown, and all we really get — amid a welter of movement, dance, stage action, drum and guitar music and rapped moralising — is a semi-amusing lecture on why the word “slut” is inappropriate. Oh, and Kon gets off with his Nina (the charismatic Stella Baker), leading to more offstage echoes of Chekhov. There is bad news from Moscow, and a surprise visit from Mama, who has pulled strings in the very tight Moscow arts-politics world. She, incidentally, is played by the celebrated Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite, who became famous in the West through Nikita Mikhalkov’s great 1994 film Burnt by the Sun. It ends with Kon yelling something (probably frightfully important) at us that is completely drowned out by some full-on guitar jamming by Shukhrat Turdikhodjaev.
You might ask “how does this concern us?” (beyond the usual opportunities to feel all righteous and superior to those savage Russkies), and really the chance of some entertaining satire on the idiocies of American censoriousness, morphing from Biden-era wide-awoke nonsense to the doom-laden arts-world “it’s 1933 all over again!” Trumpy panic of today is a bit gestural. Well, apart from a big we’re-doomed programme note by the former Masha Gessen, but that’s about it. This feels like a chance missed, though it would no doubt have over-stuffed the play.
So, everything is a bit superficial, from the characters to the actual meat and gravamen. But it’s done with terrific energy (nobody more so than multi-tasking MC Andrey Burkovskiy), and a kind of wild theatrical imagination, that produces some top stuff en route, a kind of coked-up Complicité-style physical theatre that is brilliantly inventive and jolly — a snowball fight with Lenin’s corpse, a nightmare of good old keeps-on-giving bareback Putin on his horse, party scenes of obscure import but excellent Matisse-inspired primitive vigour.
I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if everyone raves about it, and it went down a bomb with a first-night crowd heavily weighted towards a certain kind of well-connected and enhanced London Russian woman. But this is perhaps the issue: even as they are busy suffering madly, they do seem to find it hard to get over the general marvellousness of being Russian. Yes, it’s probably nice that Russia and Russians take theatre and the arts seriously. But the other side of that coin is that those arts have forever been weaponised by sequential tyrannies as an arm of state power.
It’s a great coup for the slightly obscure Marylebone Theatre to have got hold of this show
That was true even in the good times, when Moscow’s Culture Minister Sergei Kapkov was busily promoting the likes of the iconoclast director Kirill Serebrennikov: at that time, the state was playing around with creating an unbuttoned, avant-garde, free-spirited new generation of artists who would bring pride and credit to the Rodina. After the Crimea land-grab that all became irrelevant: Russia had regained its pride through more traditional means. The arts gang, who had become terribly pally with such creatures as Vladislav Surkov, the true (albeit obligatorily “shadowy”™) architect of Putinism, had served their purpose, and a new politics required a new (well, v old-skool), patriotic culture-world to back it up. Kapkov (a Roman Abramovich protégé who actually did great things in Moscow, and has been heavily involved in prisoner-exchange negotiations with the Ukrainians), had a wife called Sofia … who, after their divorce and her emigration, became the producer of this Seagull at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. You see? So you sometimes wish the Russian arts gang might consider all that and try to be just a little less delighted with themselves.
But we’ll be hearing more of Molochnikov, for sure. He’s only 33, and very much a product of that arts boom, making films, creating and directing plays at the Moscow Arts and Malaya Bronnaya Theatres, and staging an edgy ballet version of The Seagull at the Bolshoi (which is where the inspiration for this came from). It’s a great coup for the slightly obscure Marylebone Theatre to have got hold of this show, which if nothing else brings a good shot of exotic adrenaline to London’s smug and insular theatre world. Let’s hope next time he comes up with something just as original but perhaps a tad less self-referential. Or even — perish the thought! — not Russian at all …
Until Oct 12
