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Director
Nicolas Kent
Translated by
Ariadne Nicolaeff
Designer
Bunny Christie
Lighting
designer
Matthew Eagland
Cast includes
Jenny Jules
Paul Nicholls
Gyuri Sarossy
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The
Tricycle Theatre
14 February
- 16 March 2002
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Leningrad, winter
1942. Russia is in the grip of war and
one of the coldest winters in its history.
Freezing weather, starvation and German
bombs kill ten times more people than
died in Hiroshima. Corpses are left
in the street, there is no room in the
graveyards and no one has the energy
to move them. Such was the inspiration
for "The Promise", a play
by Alexei Arbuzov, here reinterpreted
by Nick Dear.
The first act
takes place during the siege of Leningrad,
showing how some fatefully survived
the terrible ordeal while others collapsed
around them in the streets. In the midst
of all the horror stands a derelict
building, most of whose inhabitants
have died from starvation. Lika (Jenny
Jules), a girl close to her sixteenth
birthday, has crept into one of its
rooms to try to get warm. She is roused
from a half-starved doze by Marat (Paul
Nicholls) whose apartment it is. Tensions
soon subside because neither has anywhere
else to go. They grow closer, struggling
to remain as human as possible amid
the destruction outside. Just as they
are settling into their misfortunes,
Leonidik (Gyurai Sarossy), another orphan
of the war, falls into the apartment
on the edge of death. On the edge of
giving in to cold and hunger these three
young people, who have nothing, have
stumbled upon each other and thereby
founded a permanent comradeship.
The second act
relates how that comradeship affects
the three of them after the war. They
had dreamed dreams together in that
room – where Lika and Leonidik
still live – in the harsh time
of the siege, but in the post-war light
of day fear of failure, and the circumstances
they find themselves in the post-war
Soviet Union, turns the dreams to smoke.
Jenny Jules is outstanding as Lika metamorphosing
from an ambitious girl into a disillusioned
woman, while remaining the pivot around
which the lives of Marat and Leonidik
turn. Paul Nicholls' is a wonderfully
enigmatic Marat, always coming back
as if drawn by the thread of fate to
that significant room, hiding his fears
and failures behind lies. Leonidik,
the unfilled poet married to a woman
who loves someone else, is tenderly
played by Gyurai Sarossy. As the story
unfolds it becomes apparent that none
of the three can overcome the past.
The world outside
the room is portrayed in film between
scenes, a panorama of tragic images
which comments upon what passes in the
room by showing what it helps them to
escape. Nicholas Dear's fluent direction,
and the cast's strong ensemble performance,
together vividly succeed in portraying
the travesty of war, and how its legacy
of fear, anger and hope affect the lives
of those who survive its bitterest manifestations.
Elizabeth Shenton |
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