Written in 1907 in the wake of anti-tsarist uprisings, Maxim Gorky’s play is getting its British premiere in Cathy Porter’s translation. Although decently done by Anthony Biggs in his final production at this valuable venue, it is a clumsy, overloaded piece in which Gorky uses a dysfunctional family as a metaphor for the chaotic divisions within the surrounding society.
Gorky went on to write Vassa Zheleznova, which dealt with a browbeating matriarch. Here, the focus is on a bullying patriarch. Ivan Kolomiitsev is, in fact, a retired police chief notorious for his brutal treatment of political prisoners and young offenders. Even though an attempt has lately been made on his life, there are grave doubts as to the identity of his assailant and that is the dilemma he faces. If Ivan admits to trumped-up charges against an innocent man, he may lose the new police post he desperately craves. If, however, he fails to admit his complicity in corruption, his wealthy brother will not pay the bribe needed to guarantee the new job.
That moral conundrum should be at the heart of the play. Instead it surfaces late on as Gorky obsessively dwells on the horrors of Ivan’s family life. Ivan sees himself as a “wounded lion”. Instead he comes across as a monstrous tyrant who sponges off his brother, savages his wife and treats his five children with varying degrees of contempt: the only two he warms to are his eldest son who has inherited his father’s depravity and a married daughter whom he lubriciously fondles. Gorky is clearly suggesting the household mirrors a Russia in which dictatorship breeds anarchy, but there are too many characters to cope with and Ivan is too terrible to engage our sustained interest.
Biggs’s production does everything possible to clarify the complex action and the acting is perfectly good. Daragh O’Malley rampages and roars as Ivan and conveys the untrammelled egotism of the autocrat. There is valiant support from Tim Woodward as his more liberal-minded brother, Annabel Smith as a daughter left deformed by Ivan’s capriciousness, and Kirsten Obank as a younger child used as a pawn in his battle for survival.
But the most sympathetic performance comes from Maroussia Frank as the family nurse constantly driven to seek refuge from the noise and domestic tumult. I understood how she felt.
• At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 1 July. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
