From Russia with love | 3 October 2009

The Drunks; The Grain Store
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Sooner or later RSC chief Michael Boyd was going to make a Stratford move on his Russian background. Trained in Moscow at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre (1979–80), Boyd got used to KGB agents sitting in on his rehearsals. It’s a tribute to the best of Russian theatre that the authorities have always needed to keep an eye on it. Always, and quite rightly, keen to extend the RSC’s frontiers beyond the Shakespearean canon, Boyd has just launched ‘Revolutions: an exploration of a new generation of post-Soviet theatre’.

The programme has already featured five play readings that included ‘a buoyant monologue about life in the Russian Navy and the best way to cook a dog’, and ‘a beautiful and cinematic epic’ in which a family tragedy ‘forces five-year-old Alina to live near a disused railway line with her Aunt Irma’. Having foregone attendance at these readings, it’s left for me to report on the two substantial RSC commissions that have been running in the Courtyard.

So, welcome first to The Drunks by the brothers Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov. Translated by Nina Raine, directed by Anthony Neilson, the new play chimes perfectly with President Medvedev’s recently announced campaign against what he calls ‘the pandemic of drunkenness’. The story is of a brain-damaged soldier returning home from the front. The mayor, the police chief and the editor of the local rag vie with one another to enlist him as a talismanic war hero in their campaigns to win the upcoming election.

Ilya, the much put-upon innocent, is an island of sobriety in the tumultuous vodka seas tossing around him. Disastrous, therefore, are the effects upon him as one and all deploy alcohol to win him round to their side.