Railway stations are places to wait for Godot, arenas for brief encounters and Anna Karenin's suicide, staging-posts in tawdry-romantic Greeneland, or for boarding-schools, wars and extermination-camps, as well as for the trains that are beautiful because we missed them. Black Milk, the latest play by Vassily Sigarev (author of the prize-winning Plasticine, is promisingly set in a shabby rural station in contemporary post-Soviet Russia, with two central characters Beckettianly waiting for a train and undergoing an existential crisis. But it never quite fulfils its promise. 
      Poppet and Lyovcik are a spivvy couple up from the town trying to palm off dodgy toasters on the local countryfolk. For all the urban sophistication and superiority they assume over the 'fucking aborigines', they themselves are also ignorant victims, not even aware that the heavily-pregnant Poppet should not be smoking, or of how childbirth will affect them. Sigarev avoids easy demarcations – the country people are also cynical and exploitative at times – but Poppet's stay in the local village while having her baby gives her a chance of redemption. Claiming to have seen God during childbirth, she wants to stop being 'a bitch' who looks down on everyone and 'be like a real person'. She refuses to go back to the urban life with Lyovcik, or tries to. It's the opposite of 'Moscow! Moscow!', the hopeful, futile cry in Checkov's Three Sisters of the bourgeiousie who are determined to leave their country backwater for work and involvement in real life. When Poppet says 'I want to llie, too. LIVE', she longs to reject the spurious sophistication of town-life, and rebuild and manage the local sawmill. 
      Why the play doesn't quite take off, with all these echoes and epitomisations, and with sharp characterisation and acting, is mysterious. The use of boringly obscene language might be one reason. Realistic and apposite, it is nonetheless alienating, as is the unloveableness of Lyovcik and of the unmaternal Poppet, however authentic. Where the play comes most to life is in the short episode with Auntie Pasha (Di Botcher) the local midwife, whose humanity and warmth are a great relief in the general bleakness.
Jane O'Grady