Multi-layered drama evokes Russia’s past with revealing relevance for its present
While Russia continues to hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons and President Putin lives up to the role of ‘bogeyman of the West’, this drama from Rosalind Adler and Lea Sellers seems timely on several levels.
Exploring the life and career of Dmitri Shostakovich, who lived and worked under the dictatorship of Stalin, gives an obvious musical element to the show. Seated at a baby grand piano, actor and musician Benjamin O’Mahony, who plays Dmitri – or ‘Mitya’ as he’s dubbed here – tackles extracts from the Russian composer’s pieces with passion.
It is easy to empathise with his growing discomfiture. A screen in the background shows him passing from an 11-year-old boy during the Russian revolution in 1917, when he admired Stalin, to an adulthood in which he’s craving making music on his own terms and not according to the diktats of ‘Socialist realism’ and propaganda.
The box-set by designer William Fricker, at first deceptively simple, makes an effective platform for that gem of a piano. What is clearly a spacious drawing room soon begins to reveal hidden versatility – both in the staging and in the story, the latter of which requires secret furnishings because of the dangers inherent in openly defying the Stalinist requirements.
There’s a telephone concealed among some strategically placed cushions and, from the getgo, it’s clear Mitya is hiding sheet music of at least one controversial score under the floorboards. During the 1948 Zhdanov decree, Shostakovich was censored by Stalin (alongside fellow composers Khachaturian and Prokofiev, to name but two). His wife Nina is also in the room with him from the start. Vividly and powerfully played by Jenna Augen, she is his rock and support, despite the frustration she clearly feels for his dangerous frustration with Stalin’s dictatorship.
Shostakovich did compose a few pieces, however, that hit the right note for Stalin and his minions, above all his Symphony No 7, which rejoiced in Leningrad’s successful defiance of Hitler. And, in an unexpected development after the interval, Stalin is on the phone with personal orders for Mitya to be his cultural envoy at a conference in America in 1949.
Throughout the play, other characters come and go, including Izaak (Fergus O’Donnell) the plumber, his daughter Katya (Phoebe Pryce) and a red flag-waving lass, who inspires Mitya to check out her musical promise as he seats her at his piano.
Under Kate Fahy’s careful and detailed direction, Holy Fool’s stretching of timelines provides an opportunity to share the intriguing trajectories of the characters’ lives, loves and opinions.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Mark Douet
Holy Fool runs until Saturday 10 October. 7.30pm, 3pm (Thu & Sat only). £22.50. Park Theatre, N4 3JP. parktheatre.co.uk