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.