It is difficult to know whether Vassily Sigarev's 90-minute work, presented as part of the Court's international playwrights season, is a direct response to social disintegration in Russia or to international fashions in playwriting. Probably a bit of both. Either way, in Dominic Cooke's visceral but confusing promenade production in the tiny Theatre Upstairs, it gives new meaning to the concept of "in-yer-face" drama.
From the general melee in, around and above Ian MacNeil's balconied set, it takes time to work out what is going on. But gradually it becomes clear that the prime focus is on Maksim: a moody, mixed-up teenager who lives with his gran and spends much of his time alone in his room modelling figures out of Plasticine. When he does venture outside, the results are always disturbing. In the streets he is accosted by whores, hustlers and queer-bashers. At school he is eventually expelled after waving a Plasticine willy at a female teacher. And when his friend, Lyokha, lures him out on a supposed double date, they both end up being buggered (off stage, mercifully) by two burly men with tattoos.
You could relate the play, which apparently takes place in "a faceless city in the Urals", to a dark Dostoevskian tradition of urban life as modern hell. Or you could say that Sigarev has been unduly influenced by British dramatists and is attempting a Russian Shopping and Fucking. But the real problem is that his play never analyses the source of Maksim's alienation and at only two moments rises above a generalised portrait of urban squalor. One is when Lyokha's mother bribes a teacher with a swimming-pool pass; the other is when Maksim's gran urges the boy to buy some cheap beef reduced in price for election day. Suddenly you get a glimpse of the endemic corruption that has survived the collapse of the Soviet system.
I have to say the play is much clearer when read, in Sasha Dugdale's translation, than when seen in Cooke's production. Superficially, there is some excitement in actors popping up everywhere or in a segment of MacNeil's set suddenly going walkabout. But, with its cinematic grope-ins, hectic wedding parties and street chaos, the production's bustling commotion tends to dominate the text. Michael Legge as the solitary Maksim, John Rogan as an overbearing headmaster and Myfanwy Waring as an unattainable vision of beauty make their mark in a large cast. But the overwhelming impression is of an urban nightmare lacking social definition.
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