Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the slalom. And a few figure skaters are pirouetting around the rink. Midair daredevils, with their feet lashed to planks of bendy plastic, are performing spectacular twirls and somersaults and crashes. And there are speed freaks on tea trays racing down ice-packed gulleys in tribute to the Hadron Collider. But the real action is off-piste and off-chute. It’s a political grudge match. Two implacable foes are angrily denouncing each other as shameful and perverted barbarians.
The Hope Theatre’s verbatim drama, Sochi 2014, taps into this febrile mood with a documentary history of gay Russia since the collapse of the Soviet empire. At first all was rosy. When the Russians finally emerged from beneath the commie jackboot, they welcomed homosexuality as an emblem of freedom and openness. Gay people could stroll around Moscow hand-in-hand, unmolested, in the early 1990s. But with the rise of Putin, the clouds darkened. Homosexuals were identified as an internal enemy and used to divert attention from Russia’s economic woes.
In this brief and gripping drama there are accounts of gay-bashing and gay murder that harrow the senses more horribly than anything I can recall hearing. The script also has astute political antennae and reveals Putin as a master of public rhetoric. He exploits anti-gay sentiment by eliding it with Russia’s traditional mistrust and envy of Europe. Everyone in the European Union, claims Putin, is gay. Our continent is riddled with infertile and unChristian pederasts who have no interest in children except as sex toys. Incapable of procreating, we rely on an army of migrants to keep our economy on the boil but their presence now threatens our bloodline.
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