Sister Morticia has kindly agreed to review The Curing Room which previewed at London's Pleasance Theatre and next will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival during August.
The Curing Room
By Ian David Lee
Directed by Joao de Sousa
Image Credit: Stripped Down Productions
(https://www.facebook.com/thecuringroom)
The Curing Room previewing at the Pleasance
Theatre before going to the Edinburgh Fringe is certainly not an easy play to
watch...but it doesn't pretend to be.
The stage is an empty black rake with a single
metal drain in the middle, onto which are pushed six naked men with one already
there lying asleep or dead. These men
are Polish soldiers, imprisoned in this cellar by the Russian army who have
captured the area. They have been stripped of their clothes as a degradation,
to remove their dignity, their status and so they have been left in the dark,
empty cellar beneath a monastery with an iron door to prevent escape.
As soldiers they cling to rank. Captain Victor
Nikolov (Rupert Elmes) is their commanding officer – a man who seems too young
for his position, out of his depth, a public schoolboy type who believes
strongly in honour and order. His hand
is bleeding profusely where the Russians ripped his wedding ring from him, as
they had from all the married soldiers in the troop. He is a kind man, a just
man, an officer who needs his men to look up to him so must stand firm in his
beliefs and set an example for the lower ranks. He is ashamed to be naked
before his men, but cannot be seen to show this weakness. His men must endure
the indignity, he can endure. He is an officer.
Then there is Senior-Lieutenant Sasha Ehrenberg. A
man of courage and honour, and deeply spiritual. He is a soldier who has fought
many battles and has put his faith in his God. He wishes he could hear the
songs that the monks would have sung in the monastery above them. He misses his
wife, his daughters, his home, but he is a strong man. He fights for his beliefs, he fights for his
comrades. Harvey Robinson gives an incredible performance as a man who is
complex, but just and CANNOT shy away from making the hardest of decisions when
the most impossible choices need to be made.
Junior-Lieutenant Leonid Drossov is a brutal man –
a powerhouse of a soldier. He has won his nickname “Animal Killer” through the
nastiest of actions, but he wears it proudly and dares any man to go against
him. He knows he's stronger than his Captain, both physically and mentally, and
he burns to show that strength and authority.
He's no grunt of a soldier, just there for the violence, he has the
instincts of a man who has survived a gruelling career in the forces and he
doesn't suffer fools or weakness. His posture dares any of the others to take
him on or cross him. An extremely strong and physical performance by Will
Bowden.
John Hoye is Private Nils Sukeruk – a lifelong
soldier who has fought wars and conflicts and is grizzled from battle. Here is this room he is missing his 'little
wife', who waited to marry him and is now so far away. He is not a leader,he is
content to follow orders – but in this place the orders have become obscene to
the point of inhuman and he wishes to retain his humanity.
The man that was found already in the cellar is
Lieutenant Vasilii Kozlov, already known to Sasha from home before the war. A
confirmed and vocal atheist, when the others cry to God for help, he bluntly
reminds them that their God does not exist and will not help them. He is a man
who doubts everything and trusts no one. He is played by Marlon Solomon as
someone who is cunning enough to try to save himself in every situation but
still thinks about his beloved young son at home and cries that he may never
see him grow up.
Then there is young Private Georgi Poleko – the
self-confessed ladies man with a girl in every village, proud of his prowess, a
farm boy and a welcome clown to all his friends. He's afraid of nothing in the war and
fiercely patriotic. Matt Houston plays him perfectly as the squaddie with the
jokes, the one who gets the girls, envy of his mates and protector of his
friend, Private Yura Yegerov. Yura is a
little 'slow', not understanding the world of men and war but eager to do as
his is bid by his friends. “Is this a game?” he asks, as another horror unfolds
before them. “Yes, Yuri, it's a game...”
says Georgi, trying to hide from him a truth he must not comprehend. Thomas
Holloway plays Yuri beautifully. A child
in the body of young man, relying on that innocence to bring out the protective
instincts of a group of men who cannot afford that mercy. It is Yura who finds a bat in the cellar with
them,and with childlike delight, names her and gets all the others to call her
Basia. It is heartbreaking to watch the changes that this horrific situation
bring about in a boy who cannot understand the implications of what his
happening around him.
The men realise that this cellar is a curing room,
where meat was cured and as the days slowly pass, they can only lick dew from
the stones for moisture but the hunger begins to break them down and they start
to see that there is only one possible way of survival.
The true horror of the play is the situation where
we are watching characters we have come to know actually having to decide that
some must die so that others can potentially live, and how this choice can be
made. The Captain must make an order to
exonerate any survivors from guilt should rescue come, and this is a decision
that he is completely unprepared to make. Nothing in his life has equipped him
to deal with this...but he must. It is
the aftermaths of deaths, recriminations, beliefs and reactions that make this
production so powerful and it clearly shows the difference between nakedness
and nudity. It is the nakedness of vulnerability and stripped down humanity as
we watch the characters wrestle their own demons and each other as they fight
to somehow live, keep their sanity and hold onto the fragile hope that rescue
could come. Character traits are starkly lit in the isolation, and personal
battles revealed as tiny slights and disagreements blow up into full scale war
in this claustrophobic prison, although
the show has a deep vein of gallows humour running through the script.
Last night the entire audience were transfixed in
almost absolute silence throughout the play – no whispering, no talking, no
papers rustling, not a phone beeping, just totally mesmerised by the
characters. A woman next to me was
covering her eyes at the horror of violence committed and bones being
sharpened. An intense and very thought
provoking production. I did feel sorry that the actors were robbed of some well
deserved applause by a power cut in the auditorium as they were due their
curtain call, but they came on in the dark nevertheless and took the cheers of
the shell shocked audience.
Sister Morticia
Pleasance Theatre
20th July 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment