Russia
Laura de Lisle
When Bliss, a new play adapted from an Andrei Platonov short story by Fraser Grace, made its debut in Russia in early 2020, Cambridge-based company Menagerie were told that their production was “very Russian”.I’m no expert on Russian culture, but I would agree – in a good way. Paul Bourne’s production for the Finborough Theatre takes a while to warm up, but still packs a poignant punch.Nikita Firsov (Jesse Rutherford) has returned home from the Civil War to a post-apocalyptic landscape: rural Russia in 1921. There’s no food and almost no people. The price of stealing grain is execution, and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner observes two strangers on a train, taking the arduous journey from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk in 1998. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student hoping to study ancient rock paintings, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) a skinhead Russian miner. Their first encounter is disastrously un-cute, as he leeringly suggests she’s heading north to sell herself, pawing her lap for emphasis. But this idiosyncratically romantic film testifies that most people have something in common, if forced together long enough to find out.Laura thought she’d be sharing her Read more ...
Ian Julier
Who could have imagined the table-turning controversy that might have cast doubt on the inclusion of works by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky when planning this programme?Before raising the baton, Holly Mathieson expressed the hope that Russian music written before the current crisis would survive to be performed after it. Vociferous applause from the audience and bravo to the Association of British Orchestra and its members for their announcement of a measured approach and refusal to cancel Russian music. Let’s hope other arts institutions follow their cue. Completed in 1940 and bearing Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hindsight is everything. In the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, political intrigues have suddenly taken on a far more menacing face, disbelief has been pulverised by reality – and theatre has become actuality.A few weeks ago, the Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe was listed at the Barbican as a psychological drama set in a dystopian near future, a “fantasy and political thriller about the dangers of looking away when authoritarianism takes root.” The thrill of doom art without doom reality.But at the weekend the production seemed to have been projectile-vomited onto the stage by Read more ...
David Nice
A plea to anyone who was seeing Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera for the first time at the Hackney Empire: please don’t give up on ever seeing or listening to it again, as some I spoke to afterwards said they just had. I promise you, the fault lies in this production, though not for the most part in the singing.Pushkin’s original, very succinct, satirical verse fairy tale was a clever kick against the tyranny of Tsar Nicholas I; Rimsky-Korsakov and his librettist Belsky saw the twilight of empire in 1907, though the composer didn’t live to see his opera, so long censored and banned, on the stage Read more ...
Ian Julier
With a predictable Sheku sell-out in the hall, the context of post-Eunice clean-up and current teetering on the brink with Russia lent a strangely unsettling and salutary resonance to the programme of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto framed by Mussorgsky and Borodin.A palpable sense of coded autobiographical artistic angst, Nature, and festive celebration reflecting both truth and beauty from two different Russian centuries onto the much changed homeland and world view of present times seemed inescapable.In Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera of political and religious intrigue Khovanshchina, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The cherry orchard in Anton Chekhov’s eponymous play is a classic MacGuffin, its existence a reason to stir the sorts of resentments, fancies and identity causes that start wars and revolutions. The orchard’s beautiful, and that’s all – a cultivated but natural ornament upon the great land of Russia, where need and want hold sway over millions of wretched and enslaved people.Have those breathtaking horizons of white blossoms any use other than that? Is there a greater importance to existence than being beautiful? Nearly 120 years on, the conundrum is just as vital, and the play is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mariya Saakyan’s 2006 debut feature is bookended by grainy footage of what looks like a fire-ravaged diary, the distressed, crumbling scraps of paper torn and charred. The missing pages and unfinished sentences spill over into what follows, Saakyan inviting viewers to fill in the gaps in this haunting, elegiac film.Mayak (translated as The Lighthouse), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman returning to her war-torn homeland in the early 1990s, attempting to persuade her elderly grandparents to come with her back to Moscow. Saakyan described Mayak as “a personal story”, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such sonic experimentalists as King Midas Sound, Zonal and Techno Animal, is clearly not someone who lacks either artistic ambition or confidence. For his latest project, Kevin has taken on the task of rescoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 celluloid sci-fi opus, Solaris.It’s fair to say that Martin has produced an eerie and dreamlike alternative soundtrack Read more ...
David Nice
All 15 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas deserve to be seen and heard live at least once, though not all of them need staging. Veteran director David Pountney’s bold choice for Grange Park Opera actually gives us two, a prologue reworked as music-drama and the action of 15 years later, exclusive subject of the original and final versions of his first opera; for this Russian-opera trainspotter, that leaves only two more to tick off the list – Pan Voyevoda and Servilia (fine music, fusty ancient Roman plot). The dramaturgy of what's known here as Ivan the Terrible is peculiar, the action lopsided, Read more ...
David Nice
Peasant harvesters enter from the facsimile of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington garden to the right (stage left) of the state-of-the-art pavilion and, splendidly led by a solo tenor (Dominick Felix), burst into song. The temptation is to burst into tears, for this is the first time, surely, any of us has heard a rich, full chorus live for over a year. From the pit, the Philharmonia players, a day after their Festival Hall triumph with Esa-Pekka Salonen, sound as lush as you could possibly want in Tchaikovsky’s glorious score, and if all bar one of the principals aren’t quite ideal, the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s such a genial feel to the pairing of Oliver Ford Davies and Stephen Boxer in Ben Brown’s new play that there are moments when we almost forget the weighty historical circumstances that lay behind the long-awaited encounter between two old friends, this evening of conversation and drinking, that is its subject. For Brown’s protagonists are sometime MI6 colleagues Graham Greene and Kim Philby, reunited in Moscow in 1987 as the former, now one of the world's best-known writers, pays a visit to his old acquaintance, the defector ensconced in the third decade of his Soviet exile. The Read more ...