Butterfly
Peter Jenkins
The Suicide (RSC, Aldwych) A frantic flowering of the intelligence and the arts followed the Russian Revolution in 1917. It didn't last long; in the theatre it lasted from the opening of the Meyerhold Theatre in 1920 to the death of Mayakovsky in 1930. Lenin's New Economic Policy, Which he instituted in 1921 favoured cultural import and exchange and, in any case, Lenin believed that bourgeois culture (which he much preferred to the Proletkult) would have to do the new socialist society for the time being. The excitement of that Period in the theatre we know about mainly from books; for it was a director's theatre and in any case new plays were in as short supply as meat in the young Republic.
Meyerhold was a legendary figure whose impact on the theatre far exceeded what he, Was able to produce. His most famous Production was of Gogol's The Inspector General in 1926 but among the new Soviet Plays he staged were Mayakovsky's The Bed Bug and Bath House and a satire by an unknown young writer, Nikolai Erdman, ealled The Warrant. Erdman's second play, Pk' Suicide, was commissioned by ivleyerhold but never reached the stage and indeed until this day has never been Performed in the Soviet Union. Stalin in 1928 put an end to the NE!' and to the avant-garde; he became his own chief censor — Stalin knew what he liked. In the end he had Meyerhold arrested and murdered in prison. His actress wife was rn. urdered in her flat in a particularly ghastly TaShion. Shostakovich in his memoirs, TestiPnony (a wonderful book, by the way), tells how, shortly before the Meyerhold iheatre was closed, Kaganovich, a precur8,?1* of Zhdanov, came to see a play there. 1-1. e left in the middle of it. Meyerhold, then his sixties, ran out after him and pursued Ills ear down the street. He ran until he fell. _The Suicide is a brilliant play and anyone who failed to see it last year at Stratford or „aLt the Warehouse in London, as I did, mlould make sure not to mis it at the RSC's !flain theatre. In content and in the manner Itnh.which it is done it communicates somereing of the manic atmosphere of post volutionary, NEP Moscow. Satire flourishes especially in such times; extravagant hopes are being dashed extravagantly, public philosophy is at gross variance with private experience, the regime can be mocked in the name of its own aspirations. Mocking revolutions is a dangerous game, however; revolutionary governments are not famed for their sense of humour. At such times the theatre is the most powerful of the arts and usually the first to be suppressed. Erdman's play is a splendid example of the theatre living dangerously, it is like a butterfly captured in that brief moment between the beginning and the beginning of the end.
Deprived of a job, Semyon Semyonovitch, is drawn unheroically towards the idea of suicide. It is neither his own idea nor his wish but a racketeering neighbour's who sees possibilities in selling options on his last political will and testament. A representative of the Soviet intelligentsia arrives and pleads with him to die for the intelligentsia, so does a courtesan who would like him to die in unrequited love for her, and a writer who wants him to die for literature, and so on; even the butchers are looking for a Martyr. Semyon Semyonovitch first tries to give new purpose to his life by learning the tuba in one difficult lesson but when this has failed there seems nothing left but his revolver. He is given a farewell dinner and assumed afterwards to have done the deed. Instead he is brought home dead drunk. A coffin and flowers arrive. An elaborate funeral is arranged. Semyon Semyonovitch rises from the coffin but his friends turn their backs on him, alive he is no use to anyone; he clings to the last vestige of the individual liberty released by the revolution and pleads for the freedom at least to remark that 'life is hard'; but the secret police by now have got his number, the living individualist is a threat to the security of the state.
The Suicide is at times hilariously funny in the manner of farce, at other times biting in its satirical wit, and at the end approaches tragedy. There are excellent performances from Edward Petherbridge as a Turgenevlike parody of a relic of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, Nicholas Gecks as the writer with his ludicrous Tolstoyan nostalgia for a sledge and the steppes at night and Lila Kaye as a cockneyMoscow version of the stock mother-inlaw. The leading role is played with characteristic energy and athletic grace by Roger Rees, now of Nicholas Nickleby fame. But most of all I admired the strong period atmosphere and elegant style of this production by Ron Daniels with sets by Kit Surrey. Here was a fascinating play born in the passion of exciting and troubled times and this RSC production succeeds in making us feel something of what it would have meant to have been there.
Previous page
