Russia is more integral to British theatre than any other continental country. Not only has it given us Chekhov and Bulgakov, but it also provides a library of stories that remain powerfully suggestive and resonant. These two plays explore the cultural and historical landscape of Eastern Europe and show the continuing relevance of pan-national modernism.
Set in Russian-occupied Eastern Poland, Nicholas Wright’s new drama, Travelling Light, evokes the early years of film-making. Using the form of a memory play, Wright introduces us to Maurice Montgomery, a Hollywood director, who looks back from the 1930s to his youth in a pre-war shtetl, a place where the clash of different cultures – Jewish, Polish and Russian – created a melting pot of creativity.
The young Motl Mendl, as he was originally named, returns to his village after the death of his father, the local photographer, and discovers a Lumière Brothers cinematograph, which he soon uses to film his neighbours.
Financed by Jacob, a timber-merchant, Motl is inspired by Anna, a gentile servant, and together in some of the evening’s most enthralling scenes they discover the possibilities of close-up, montage and editing. But filming friends and neighbours doesn’t get you very far, and soon they embark on a fictional story.
Of course, in real life, movies were not discovered by one person in one place, but evolved in several different locations through the creative meeting of
new technological possibilities and the demands of the mass market. But this parable of artistic vision and the dawning imagination is at first enormously suggestive, and nicely mixes humour with illustrative film projections.
In the second half, Motl turns out to be much less illustrious that we might have at first believed. Wright creates an imaginative ending to his play that artfully ties up the loose ends in the manner of a master storyteller.
It’s not very plausible, but it is enjoyable. The charm of the play is that is stimulates and entertains, but without stretching the audience. Like its title, it travels lightly across the terrain from Western Europe to America.
Watching the birth of a new art form like this feels a bit miraculous and, in common with plays such as Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock Blonde, the account given here suggests that modern movies from the beginning necessitated a compromise between artistic integrity and populism. And knowing mirth is derived from showing how money problems and interfering producers were there from the start.
Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Travelling Light stars Antony Sher as Jacob, Damien Molony as Motl and Lauren O’Neil as Anna. If there is a tendency for Sher to hover on the brink of Fiddler on the Roof cliché, this is partly because that musical and the art of Marc Chagall have so successfully imprinted their vision of shtetl life onto our imaginations that it is difficult to eradicate them. But if the production sometimes feels a bit inauthentic in its portrayal of Jewish life, it remains a good account of how the preoccupations of some Eastern Europeans stamped their mark onto the Hollywood dream machine.
By contrast, Nancy Harris’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, does feel authentic as it sends us into the depths of Russia, as Pozdynyshev, a middle-aged man, rides the trains endlessly, telling anyone who will listen the story of his lustful youth, his marriage to a beautiful young innocent and then his murder of her, inspired by his jealousy of her relationship with a music teacher. Acquitted by the courts for this crime of passion, he remains trapped inside his memories and his sexual guilt.
Although Tolstoy’s main message – that chastity is much better than carnal passions – gets lost somewhere along the line, this monologue is a riveting piece of theatre. Pozdynyshev, played by the craggy and intense Hilton McRae, buttonholes the audience from the start and holds us with all the manic insistence of a man possessed. Slowly, this ex-government official tells the terrible tale of how a nice middle-class marriage turned into violence and death.
Natalie Abrahami’s production, which was first seen at this venue in 2009, is staged on a set that is a partially distressed railway carriage, with a transparent screen for the background. This enables her to show, by lighting up the hidden space behind the screen, the scenes between the wife (Sophie Scott) and the violinist music teacher (Tobias Beer) as they play Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata. Seeing and hearing the music played live definitely intensifies the story.
Not only does the play show their interaction, which evokes ideas about the erotic nature of music, but it also shows Pozdynyshev’s jealous imaginings. Although Tolstoy’s novella was banned by the Tsarist censors for its frank picture of sexuality, what comes across now is its portrait of a man consumed by his own fantasies. There is something very Russian in the openness of the text, its lack of hypocrisy and its blatant confusion. Like many troubled men, Pozdynyshev expresses both his love and his hatred for women, often within a single sentence.
The vividness of Tolstoy’s view of women reads like an argument in favour of feminism. He see them as natural sexual predators, who grossly manipulate and tempt men to forget the higher things in life. At the same time, he criticises bourgeois marriage as licensed prostitution, which was a common stance among freethinkers in the late 19th century. And the success of this production can be seen in the compelling way in which these ideas are squeezed through the diseased imaginings of their unreliable narrator.
