The White Guard

Saw The White Guard on Tuesday. It is a solid, maybe even stolid, production of a somewhat interesting play, that wears its censoredness on its sleeve.

The Turbins are a family of White Russians in Kiev during the two months from November 1918 in which the Ukraine under the nationalist Hetman was besieged in turn by the opportunistic Petlyura and then the Bolsheviks. The play follows this family, comprising a woman and her two brothers, and assorted cousins and hangers-on, from the heights of confidence (supported by the Germans, they believe they will repel the challengers). The woman’s husband is the deputy war minister and he flees to Berlin when he discovers that the Germans have decided to pull out. She takes a lover. The Hetman, discovering that the Germans are withdrawing and the army deserting, agrees to a German plan to disguise him and bundle him out of the country. We are given a brief glimpse of the brutality meted out to opponents by Petlyura’s forces, witness the final moments of their attack, and finally, two months forward, see the family, despite losses and injuries and broken relationships, prepare themselves for life under the Bolsheviks.

The play was adapted - though how freely the programme didn’t really say - by Andrew Upton with some skill. In particular, he has a good way with comedy, and brings out sharply the absurdities of the situation (‘Deputy ministers of war do not run away, they are called away’). That said, the dialogue felt a little slack in places and while he’s certainly got it technically into English, I didn’t think he’d wholly got it out of Russian.

Basic stuff: the play is seven scenes: the first three and the last are in the Turbin home; the fourth is in the Hetman’s palace, the fifth in the Petlyura camp, and the sixth in a school which is serving as a temporary base for the beleagured White Guard. The first six scenes cover something like 24 hours. The last scene is eight weeks later.

The best stuff is where he is being satirical at the expense of cowardice - the Deputy Minister, the Hetman - and the scene in the Petlyura camp is excitingly grim. The family scenes are enjoyable, though slow, and long. That familiar Russian trope of moving between laughter and tears in the drop of a teacup is much in evidence. The character of Elena’s lover, Shervinsky, is wittily played by Conleth Hill but I found him a rather implausible character; a large camp man who woos a succession of women with his beautiful singing voice. Well, maybe.

The play’s variety of scenes is interesting and we pass slowly from the family to the White Army to the opposition and back again, making it that three-act ‘into the magical forest and out again’ play, in which things are turned upside down and other things are learned. In this case, the effect is rather spoiled by the third act (in my terms) where the family resolve to learn from their mistakes and embrace Bolshevism, in some measure. This is so obviously there to placate the censors that it may have represented a kind of subversive subtextual critique, but now, 80 years later it seems old hat and rather unsatisfying. In Flight, also by Bulgakov, also at the National, also directed by Howard Davies, and one of my most enchanted theatre experiences (all the more for my having watched the play in a half-empty theatre), the variety of scenes takes us into the realm of magical realism. Here it is just mild satire and broadly we are in over-familiar family drama territory.

There is a great coup de theatre produced by the designer. We spend three scenes in the Turbin apartment, a vast and (because this is Howard Davies) monumental set with doors and windows and fireplace and everything looking solid and permanent. Then the scene ends and the whole apartment trucks slowly upstage, revealing behind it the walls of the Hetman Palace. As it parks far upstage, a rear wall is flown in to complete the space. At the beginning of the second act, we have a wide shallow, short set depicting a cross-section of the trench encampment in which the Petlyura soldiers are running the campaign. This descends in to the earth, revealing the school set. All very impressive but that kind of elaborate transformation does not seem of a piece with this quiet and careful play that walks its way cautiously around a war of attrition.

Oh and Paul Higgins is fucking marvellous in it.