A THOUGHTFUL ANGER
We need to know and feel something beyond the daily global news; sometimes theatre can place us carefully and mercilessly in the room and try to make us understand the experiences of those caught up in war, and the political forces sweeping over them. Nearly twenty years ago Nicholas Kent did this by commissioning, collating and directing THE GREAT GAME about Afghanistan in a dayful of short plays. Now, with five playwrights, he does this in an evening for the recent history of Ukraine: that an ancient country long predating the Soviet empire, whose heroic struggle has made Britain fky yellow-and-blue flags these four years in windows and along country roads. We need to know and feel it.
The feeling begins immediately, and runs between each play, as it’s framed by Mariia Petrovska perched overhead playing the traditional 65-string bandura and singing the songs of sadness and of protest which she learned growing up in Mariupol. It’s a moving and elegant way to link the plays, all set since the collapse of the USSR , with the country’s far older history from Tsars to Stalin. There is no attempt at exoticism and the six actors sound English, recognizable: David Michaels, Ian Bonar, Daniel Betts, Jade Williams, Clara Read and Sally Giles sharply versatile.
The first play, by Jonathan Myerson, takes us to something familiar: the early 1990s, a referendum for independence, demonstrations in Maidan Square and repression as Yanukovic tried to “balance” a relationship with Russia. In a hotel room a couple – he collaborative, she fired with their son’s dream of a New Ukraine – worry about him down in the square. But the breakfast trolley that enters is full of guns, manned by two pro-Kremlin snipers ready for massacre. The father’s conviction that they only fire “over their heads” is gradually shattered by savage volleys. Given their phone, do they warn their boy, or give him up to ‘build a future?”. Bleakly classic.
Next comes David Edgar’s Five Day War, set in a hunting-lodge, a puppet government preparing to move in: it’s clever, discursive, a sly portrait of ambition and political manoeuvring, and also an acknowledgement of the Russian conviction, or downright lie, that what the Special Military Operation really aims at is just a limited action to ‘protect”, “de-nazify, de-militarize” and modernize the country. Being political it is, unfortunately, the least gripping. Political wannabes do not after all spark sympathy. Interesting is the general contempt they express for “a little Jewish comic’ – Zelensky.
After the interval come three more, each in their way devastating. Natalka Vorozhbit (translated by Sasha Dugdale) gives us, against the relentless sound of bombs, a tremendous monologue by Ian Bonar as a young man, unable to sleep, thinking about his best friends. He is of conscription age but didn’t sign up, feels “hunted down” now, but both afraid and ashamed. One friend has fled expensively to Vienna and texts him jokey messages about ski-ing. Another is in the front line, maybe dead already. His girlfriend is safe in the UK but he is wretched without her, alone with his thoughts and fears and self disgust. Bonar’s performance is extraordinary, and Vorozhbit’s last line draws us straight in, with a reminder that we are safe behind the lines but not necessarily forever.“Thank you” says the young man “for the honour of battling to fight off Russia. Why us? “
David Greig takes us next right to that front line, a battered primary school classroom in East Ukraine, where two soldiers, tired and hungry and only just hoping, notice a body in the corner: one of the Koreans. He has a paper of useful phrases “Please – thank you – drop your weapon – cigarettes”. They take the cigarettes. But their Sergeant appears, notes that the man is still just alive. The question is whether as they get themselves out they will take him. Sarge says yes “No exception, evacuate the wounded”. Taking that burden will probably kill them all but “What are you fighting for?’ “Ukraine” “What is Ukraine? At this moment Ukraine is the idea that freedom can be chosen. Right is right. The consquence of a right action is not our concern. In the dark place where only soldiers go, honour is the light that guides you home. I will not quench that light”.
And so , with another poignant song from Petrovska overhead, we get to the last play, Cat Goscovitch’s portrait of the most unnerving of Putin’s war crimes: the kidnap of Ukrainian children for “Russification” , adoption and training. 20,000 of them over the last four years. Some have been able to be reclaimed, but at what cost to all? It’s short, devastating, horribly relatable when the now-teenage child returns, different.
So that’s it: Ukraine Unbroken, an extraordinary evening.
arcolatheatre.com to 28th March
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