UK Edition
Review
Sharp but narrow snapshots of Ukraine's turmoil - Bad Roads, Royal Court Upstairs, review
It’s four years since thousands of Ukrainians flocked to Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev to protest against their government’s refusal to proceed with developing political and economic ties to the EU.
Those events – which came to a revolutionary head in February 2014 – resulted in the ousting of President Yanukovych, and ongoing conflict: the annexation of Crimea and the Russian-backed separatist fightback in the Donbass region has led to more than 1.7 million people being displaced and an estimated 10,000 casualties.
Born in 1975 and described as the “leading Ukrainian playwright of her generation”, Natal’ya Vorozhbit first came to attention here in 2009 with The Grain Store at the RSC, a powerful evocation of Stalin’s 1932-33 terror-famine. The Royal Court put on staged readings of “Maidan: Voices from the Uprising”, her verbatim piece derived from interviews with protestors, in April 2014. Now she has responded (again drawing on real-life encounters, and again translated by Sasha Dugdale) to the situation in the country’s benighted eastern war-zone.
The accent is on female experience; and the emphasis on up-ending clichéd expectations. Amid Camilla Clark’s disconcerting set-design of trees rising amid an industrial tiled floor, Scottish actress Kate Dickie lets us in on the furtive, obsessive yearning a woman script-writer (researching the siege of Donetsk airport) develops for the handsome, straight-backed soldier who helps her. When they finally kiss, she goes weak at the knees, as if in a film, with the war a romantic back-drop: “In your honour bombs are falling on the far shore….”
What follows in “Bad Roads” pursues a similarly bumpy track, jolting us out of an easy sense of right and wrong, what turn things will take next. War plays havoc – sometimes exhilaratingly – with the law of desire, the usual rules of engagement.
A paramedic driving the headless corpse of her soldier lover back to be reunited with the dead man’s wife drunkenly makes an aggressive pass at her soldier passenger when their jeep breaks down in the freezing cold, before grappling with the body-bag: “He’s mine. I’ll do what I want with him”.
A head-teacher stopped at an army check-point, drink-driving and lacking a passport, is threatened with rough treatment but becomes briefly emboldened to challenge his Ukrainian interlocutors about their sexual exploitation of one of his teenage charges.
Later, in the most shocking episode, a young woman manages to coax from her sadistic-psychotic separatist captor the semblance of common humanity. You think the evening has resolved itself there, but what follows is a surreal exchange in which a woman, weeping for the chicken she has run over, tries to recompense its impoverished owners, only for them to become ever more ludicrously mercenary.
Vicky Featherstone directs. I have no complaints about what we see; the cast are superb. What’s missing is a broad, detailed sense of the political battleground, the scenes behind closed doors affecting lives on the ground. Ukraine can’t just be a passing curiosity in an upstairs theatre space. Too much is at stake for that.
Until Dec 23. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com