Theatre
Futurists (National: Cottesloe)
Too cool
Christopher Edwards
Dusty Hughes's new play opens wth an extract from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Anya remarks to Trofimov that she cares less now for the orchard. He laments the unwillingness of the intelli- gentsia to work. They are bathed in sun- light and seated on a garden bench, their heads bent forward in earnest discussion. It is a telling moment in Chekhov's play for however absurd the student radical Trofi- mov may be — he himself is quite inear able of any work himself — he is giving voice to a belief characteristic of his time; Russia must cut free from the chains of the past and welcome the harsh but bracing future that lies around the corner. Just as Trofimov is warming to his prophetic theme Hughes gives him a taste of that future by releasing a ferocious herd of grunting swine into the tranquil garden. The scene immediately dissolves and we find ourselves in a Petrograd Futurist club with Mayakovsky declaiming his verse to a packed house of assorted artistes. The play is set in 1921, the year of the Volga famine, Lenin's New Economic Policy and the anti-Bolshevik Kronstac11. Uprising. These events are mentioned and at key moments influence the plot. For the most part, however, the play stays inside the colourful Stray Dog Club which we are invited to regard as a microcosm of the turbulent political world outside. The Re volutionary poets gossip and intrigue. They too inhabit a world of faction where Acmeist denounces Futurist while leather- jacketed Prolecultists predict, with increas- ing assurance, their own grim ascendency. By the close it is this last movement, in all its grey ideological conformity, that triumphs over the experimental spirit. Their poetic valves are introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great. William Dudley's sets help punctuate this change. The club is first seen decorated with flashing bulbs and bold colours splashed around a cartoon of Lenin wield- ing a new broom. As the Prolecultists take Over this is ripped away to reveal a mural of the masses dominated by hieratic heads of Lenin and Stalin.
Talk at the club turns to who is in or out of favour and who are the latest benefi- ciaries of Maxim Gorky's generosity. Thanks to his friendship with Lenin, Gorky is able to pull strings for impoverished colleagues. Mandelstam (Roger Lloyd Pack) is there, lugubriously asking Gorky for a pair of trousers and lamenting his own descent into official obscurity. Amongst the rest there are Alexander Blok, Kolia Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and Lili Brik. For those unfamiliar with these figures the programme notes supply brief and depressing biographies, but the cast succeeds in bringing many of them to life despite the indifferent dialogue. Most dis- tinctive of all is Daniel Day Lewis's Portrait of Mayakovsky as a wilful and Paradoxical literary thug. This no doubt flatters the man whose 'submission to the voice of topical events' so appalled Boris Pasternak. But the dramatised readings of some of his poems are very striking indeed.
Hughes also succeeds in generating around these warring literati a tension that transcends mere local in-fighting. There is a brittleness in the air, a sense that the freedom of expression they enjoy is about to be extinguished. The Cheka informer and would-be poet is quite wrong when he says, defensively, of his employers: 'They don't shoot poets.' They shoot Gumilyov, for instance, allegedly for taking part in anti-Bolshevik conspiracies. This role is played by Jack Sheperd with an appealing blend of play- fulness and tragic irony. One moment he is declaiming poetry and waving a revolver in the air to attract attention — although even this bohemian-like gesture carries its Own obvious irony. The next moment he is urging a Romanov descendant to flee to Finland to lead the monarchist oppbsi- tion. - It is, however, a measure of the play's limitations that even Gumilyov's death seems just another event that comes and goes without touching us too deeply. In fact the author seems uninterested in mov- ing us at all. No individual or group is given any special favour and our pity is left unsolicited. A few arguments are advanced urging the importance of the past to the Present but they are not shaped into any governing point of view. Instead the play operates on a very general level and adopts a cool attitude to this fascinating period of Russian history. As theatre this scrupulous detachment is less than riveting. We are left at the curtain neither stirred nor shaken.
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