Arts & Culture
The Russians are coming
Published 05 February 1999
Theatre byDavid Jays
The Russian soul, someone announces during the querulous last act of Vassa, is direct but full of loathing. New revivals of Maxim Gorky's 1911 melodrama by the Almeida Theatre Company and Alexander Ostrovsky's comedy The Forest (1870) at the National Theatre are full of blunt truths and money-grubbing bile. In both, characters turn cash-register eyes on their next of kin on the calls of love and citizenship, but only avarice rings their bell. You can only wonder why the revolution took so long.
Vassa (Sheila Hancock) is a minatory matriarch with a husband on his deathbed and a vulturous brood circling round the inheritance. After a life of terrier acquisition, painfully building up a business in bricks and mortar, she is reluctant to see the firm trickle into her children's hands. Suspicion infects the air: this seems more a spy ring than a family, with everyone snooping at doors and sniffing the morning post. The deeply distressed walls of Rob Howell's set are lined with safes and rows of tiny drawers, crammed to bursting with secrets and all the truth that's fit to blackmail, with details of forged wills, assisted deaths, illicit humpings and their birth-strangled progeny.
The ties of blood can't bind as tight as purse strings, and it's telling that Gorky uses the first act to expound the characters' finances and only gets round to their emotional lives in the second, as if their hearts were pale reflections of their beating wallets. If Vassa is a monster, then this world merely confirms her worst suspicions: all she sees is a snivelling, sniping clan, including David Tennant as her wheedling humpbacked son ("Oh God," snaps Vassa, "I should have taken a pillow to him at birth") and Ron Cook as her cockerel brother-in-law, crumpled with lust and never without something phallic tucked under his arm.
Vassa herself wields maternal rectitude as a devastating weapon. Flintily subduing every scruple to the profit motive, she expects the Madonna will absolve her - "She's a mother herself." Hancock brushes doubts away like wasps, her granite eyes and poker back a constant reproach to indolence. She also gives Vassa a ceaselessly disconcerting laugh, yelping at unexpected moments - bad news is usually good for a gloat, and she grins at the thought of bumping into the ghost of a maid she drove to suicide. You fear for the ghost.
She shares this mad laughter with her daughter Anna, played by Aisling O'Sullivan as a sleek and towering fashion plate. They size each other up and work in uneasy alliance; the scenes between these mighty performers are the highlight of Howard Davies' astute, leisurely production. O'Sullivan deploys a gleaming set of gnashers, but the misery of disconsolate marriage resounds through her cavernous voice. A wind similarly whistles through the house, foretaste of payback to come (though Gorky could revise the play in 1935 and retain the petty bourgeois rapacity). Vassa, nibbled by remorse, is beginning to quake like Boris Godunov, and founds a new matriarchy with Anna and her daughter-in-law (Anne-Marie Duff), whose capacity for joy, however whittled in this household, nurtures a fragile prospect of transformation.
Family ties are equally unpromising in The Forest. Arkadiy (Michael Williams), a raddled comic actor, recalls visiting his dismal relatives: "It was as if they'd died and nobody'd broken the news to them." Arkadiy is impersonating a valet for an equally impecunious tragedian who is hoping to disguise his misfortunes and make a splash with his rich aunt Raisa (Frances de la Tour). She owns the titular estate, but is busily selling it off to shower ready cash on her callow lover. William Dudley designs a spiky forest that turns inside out to reveal interiors themselves shiny with polished wood. This fortune has been cultivated from timber, its most visible symbol a squat wooden cashbox, Raisa's boon companion.
Despite a boisterous translation by Alan Ayckbourn, Anthony Page's lackadaisical production can feel like watching trees grow. The play is generous with chat and too indulgent of actor-laddie anecdotes. Neither the masquerading glee nor thrill of hypocrisy that thrum through earlier Ostrovsky comedies emerges, and the cast shies from grotesquerie.
Not the magnificent De la Tour, though, distraught with drapery, whose monster of selfishness is convinced she has a bleeding heart, and who coquettes like a lugubrious beagle. And not Williams, whose muttering low comedian looks like an unsavoury gerbil, trailing a shabby tailcoat, with deft little paws and a face like a grizzled walnut. Michael Ratcliffe's vivid programme article reminds us how Ostrovsky loved an actor, so it seems peculiarly ungenerous that this production corrals some extras into peasant boots and whiskers, poor bastards, just for a clappity curtain call.
"Vassa" plays at the Albery Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London WC2 (0171-369 1730); "The Forest" is in repertory at the NT, South Bank, London SE1
(0171-452 3000)
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