Friday 13 April 1990

SCENES FROM REVOLUTION

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.