Review The March On Russia

Tim Gopsill is drawn into a delicate yet hard-hitting 1980s' drama where family bickering reveals a deeper malaise. 

The March On Russia 
by David Storey

A House Divided
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Marital strife is a staple element of drama, both in life and on the stage. In either milieux it can be light-hearted or deadly serious, poignant or embarrassing; it can make us laugh or cry.

In the late David Storey’s 1989 drama The March on Russia, he managed to cover pretty much the gamut in a play that is both surprising and heart-wrenching.

At first the Pasmore couple's bitter discourse makes you laugh with their obviously well-used little digs. Then the laughter becomes more nervous with embarrassment; you start to cringe and by the end you are aching with compassion for this decent, loving couple, wracked in a torture chamber of old age, isolation, claustrophobia and regret.

Ian Gelder's retired coal miner Mr Pasmore aggravates with his mock bowing and scraping at his wife’s supposed bossiness. Sue Wallace's Mrs Pasmore whines at his persistent failure to respect her house proud values.

This grim routine is disrupted by surprise guests on their 60th wedding anniversary. Their three middle-aged children, without telling each other, have all decided independently to visit  their Mum and Dad at the same time.

The occasion for this seemingly contrived, but ultimately satisfying, scenario is the old couple’s diamond wedding anniversary. 

David Storey was a master at drawing intense drama from everyday life. His reputation, revived at his death only six months ago, was made with a  gritty tough-guy drama, This Sporting Life, whereas the March on Russia is as gentle and subtle as you can get.

Yet contained within the countless opportunities for nostalgia, resentment and recriminations, the dialogue  becomes truly painful.

The Orange Tree's in-the-round stage space perfectly suits James Perkins' atmospheric set evoking the couple's Yorkshire bungalow. It maps out their home -  the sitting room with its fireplace, sofa, table and chair, the utilitarian rear kitchen with work top, fridge and sink. The invisible walls between rooms and people become solid and real for us. 

The longer the play goes on, the more frenetically the spaces are used. Yet in Alice Hamilton's sensitively directed production, after all the anguish, you feel the real affection beneath the surface tension.

It's a slow burner and all the more effective for it. The arrival of the siblings is restrained, not to say repressed, before it boils over in a pointless row over an anniversary gift, unleashing hitherto hidden depths of resentment.

Sarah Belcher is the discontented local politican daughter, Wendy, her tongue loosened by drink, speaking her mind. Connie Walker's more conciliatory housewife and mother, Eileen, and Colin Tierney's morose, workaholic academic son, living a life a world away from his working class roots, complete the homecoming.

The March On Russia, we learn, really happened. It's the stuff of a First World War anecdote often recounted by the elderly Pasmore, an eye-opening episode in the otherwise routine life of a working man. It's the only outside subject the couple have to talk about but also a resonant reflection of failed ventures and thwarted lives. 

 David Storey's portrayal of the wounded heart of a family speaks eloquently nearly 30 years after its first production at the National Theatre and more than matches playwrights like Harold Pinter and John Osborne whose works are more frequently revived.

This is a welcome revival and director Hamilton and the fine cast gives it the nuanced green light production it deserves..

Review All Our Children

All Our Children
by Stephen Unwin

 Lives in Their Hands
 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

In 1942, four months after the USA entered the Second World War,  President Franklin D Roosevelt spoke to the nation in a radio address:

"Yet ... we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color, or theory. Grant us that courage and foreseeing to begin this task today that our children and our children's children may be proud ..." 

One of the then senseless distinctions of theory was the German National Socialist regime's espousal of eugenics beginnning with a "euthanasia" programme in 1939. It targetted the mentally and physically disabled, children and eventually adults,  and anyone deemed to have a "life unworthy of life".  

Stephen Unwin's moving play focusses on the doctor, Victor Franz (Colin Tierney) in charge in an imaginary Rhineland paediatric clinic, one of many in Germany to which parents were encouraged to send their handicapped children.

Yet time is running out for Franz as his own health deteriorates, alongside the children, placed in his clinic by often loving but impoverished parents without the means or the time to look after their needs.  Children who, at first unknown to them,  suffer a terrible fate in what has been termed a rehearsal for later mass murder  

There is a lot packed in to the one-act play. This sometimes feels as if it could be a fragment of a larger, longer piece where the juxtapositions could be more pointed for the audience to work out more fully the vested interests, power struggles, compromises and cowardice.  

However the generation gap and an understandable, if detestable, callousness of inexperienced youth is plausibly delineated with the callow 23 year old ambitious Lutheran assistant to atheist Franz, Eric Schmidt (Edward Franklin).  

Germany in fact had an advanced social and welfare system, having been the first country to introduce social insurance to take care of all citizens, even though it lost its Empire and much of the means to fund the scheme after the First World War. 

The perpetrators therefore at first tried to keep the killings a secret, issuing death certificates with fake causes of death.  While there have been some documentaries, this is all a lesser known part of the National Socialist killing machine. 

The revelation of the brazen extortion involved in the subsequent bureaucracy covering up the deaths, exposed by an angry and helpless working class mother Elizabetta Pabst (Lucy Speed), elicited horrified gasps from the audience.  

A glimmer of  hope still flickers in this bleak picture when the scarlet robed aristocratic Bishop von Galen (David Yelland) comes on behalf of some of his constituents who, like Elizabetta, have come to understand what is happening. 

This is in some ways the most intellectually searching part of the play in a Shavian-like private encounter between the Catholic primate and the medic who may be compromised by his own political past. It puts the audience through almost the same process as a parent who retains hope that there can be some trust in an authority somewhere.

The Catholic bishop is a skilled theologian who holds out a sprig of hope and constructs elegant arguments condemning events he knows to be inhuman, but keeps it all carefully away from the public domain, dashing our own hopes of any moral touchstone or heroic behaviour.

Trapped between the tricked parent, the duplicitous but tormented doctor, the lofty churchman and the blinkered assistant administrator is the maid, Martha (Rebecca Johnson). She also wants to trust and find reassurance in her Catholic faith and authority figures. 

However she is still forced into harbouring justified doubts about some aspects of the regime and its perversion of communal values.

Stephen Unwin himself directs bringing clarity and precision to the proceedings. A  handsome set from Simon Higlett has shelves of grey lever arch files containing the fatal paperwork breaking up the warm wood panelling of the clinic's office. 

This is a harrowing tale of how narrow the medical profession's line can be, slipping too easily from sustaining to destroying life. While it sometimes feels a little truncated, it's a green light for a play which also challenges the ease with which we separate past actions from current-day concerns.