Paul Anderson, review of Marya by lsaac Babel (Old Vic), Tribune, 13 April 1990
Isaac Babel died in 1940, a victim of Stalin's purges. He
never saw a production of his short play Marya,
written in the early thirties. Performances were banned immediately after its
publication in 1934.
It's not hard to see why it attracted the wrath of the party
censors: its view of the hardships of the civil war is emphatically not the
stuff of Stalinist myth, even if its heart is firmly on the side of the
revolution.
Marya is set in
Petrograd in the winter of 1919. The war is raging just outside the city. There
is a curfew every night. Food and fuel are scarce. The black market,
prostitution and drunkenness are flourishing. The once wealthy Mukovkin family
is attempting to adapt to post-revolutionary life in much-reduced circumstances.
The father of the family, once a Tsarist general, is
gradually reconciling himself to the Reds. One of his daughters, Ludmilla,
tries to combat poverty by holding out the promise of marriage to a Jewish
black marketeer; the other daughter, the Marya of the title, is nursed by his
niece and the women's old nanny. In a series of vignettes of everyday life,
Babel traces the family's history to the rape of Ludmilla, her subsequent
arrest for prostitution, the old man's death and the allocation of their rooms
to a pregnant working girl and her man. Marya never appears on stage.
Babel's writing is understated, with much left to the
imagination, yet the play is extraordinarily evocative of a society in crisis.
Christopher Hampton's adaptation is well served by the actors, with Geoffrey
Bayldon as the old general and Allan Corduner as the black marketeer
particularly good. Roger Michell's production turns the scene-changes into
spectacular Futurist happenings with crowds of workers toiling away in clouds
of steam amid the clatter of machinery.
This is no twentieth-century masterpiece, but it does give a
taste of what might have developed had the dark night of Stalinism not
descended on Soviet culture.
