Earlier this season, Toronto's Harold Green Jewish Theatre gave us Lenin's Embalmers, Vern Thiessen's play about the Stalin-directed efforts to preserve the remains of the chief Bolshevik. Kate Cayley's After Akhmatova, which has just opened at the Tarragon, could serve as the dour, dissident flipside to Thiessen's black comedy.
Where Lenin had the finest scientific minds in the Soviet Union to keep him pickled in perpetuity, poet Anna Akhmatova had only her memory – and those of her devotees – to assure the survival of Requiem, her great anti-Stalinist work. Writing in the wake of Stalin's great purge of the 1930s, Akhmatova composed the Requiem cycle furtively, burning the written words as soon as she had memorized them.
The creation of Requiem is at the centre of Cayley's sombre drama, but she approaches its origins obliquely, through the unsympathetic memories of Akhmatova's son, Lev Gumilyov. The time is 1968 – two years after Akhmatova's death – and a U.S. scholar (Paul Dunn) has arrived in Leningrad to interview Lev (Eric Goulem).
Although he served 18 years in a Siberian labour camp, Lev has since been "rehabilitated" and now holds a post at the state university. He resents the fact that his mother's most famous work was partly inspired by his arrest and imprisonment in 1938. "I lived that poem," he snaps, "now I live under it."
Cayley sets up a philosophical and at times darkly witty debate between the idealistic American, who champions art and free speech and his gloomy Russian counterpart, who sees a cri de coeur like Requiem as just a footnote to history. Although their early sparring is lively, there's never any doubt that the play will land on the side of art. For all his arguing, Lev's objections to Requiem are rooted in the personal, not the political.
As he reluctantly submits to an interview, Lev recalls, in flashbacks, life with Anna (Sarah Orenstein) and her circle, including close friend Lydia Chukovskaya (Claire Calnan), poet Osip Mandelstam (Richard McMillan) and Mandelstam's wife Nadezhda (Caroline Gillis). It turns out that Lev's bad feelings stem from his prickly relationship with the chilly and distant Anna. His eventual arrest, after speaking out publicly in defence of his anti-Bolshevik father, had less to do with his convictions than with his desire to defy his mother's discreet style of dissidence.
Cayley, one of Tarragon's resident playwrights, can be a flavourful writer; the flashback scenes capture a sense of the shabby, nerve-wracking lives of artists during the Stalinist regime. But the play builds toward an intellectual revelation that turns out to be no more profound than an undergraduate essay.
Although directed by Alan Dilworth, who staged last year's vivid Tarragon hit If We Were Birds, the production is drab and the acting uneven. Goulem is entertaining as the testy, bitter Lev, but Dunn plays the American academic in a false, declamatory style that is frequently jarring. As Akhmatova, Orenstein certainly looks like the slender, dark-haired poet of the pictures, and her performance is convincing. But she stays as much at a distance from us as she does from Lev.
McMillan exudes gentle melancholy as a doomed Mandelstam calmly resigned to his fate. But an ostensibly touching scene in which Gillis's Nadezhda slowly feeds him a hard-boiled egg before he's sent off to the gulag is just silly and ponderous. And Calnan does little with the thankless role of the writer Chukovskaya, who spends most of her time memorizing other people's work.
Dilworth's muted approach, like Jung-Hye Kim's grey, gritty set and monochrome costumes, are clearly intended to evoke Russia under Stalin. They may have done too good a job. After Akhmatova is a play about the triumph of art over oppression, but here the bleak Soviet aesthetic gets the upper hand.
After Akhmatova
- Written by Kate Cayley
- Directed by Alan Dilworth
- Starring Claire Calnan, Paul Dunn, Caroline Gillis, Eric Goulem, Richard McMillan, Sarah Orenstein
- At the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto
After Akhmatova runs until May 1.
Special to The Globe and Mail