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This page contains reviews of Paul's first theatre project of 2002, The Promise.
Background Information
In the savage 1942 winter siege of Leningrad, as the Russians fight off the Nazi invaders, three teenagers, Lika (played by Jenny Jules), Marat and Leonidik are thrown together. Losing everything from their pasts, they forge a new love that binds them together and a new hope which keeps them alive: the promise of a better future.
After the war, now Heroes of the Soviet Union, Marat and Leonidik both return to the only woman they could ever love, and Lika is forced to make an impossible choice between two men who keep the promise alive.
The only Soviet play ever to have transferred to the West End, Arbuzov’s classic of the 1960s is revived now in a striking new version by Nick Dear whose re-working of 'Summerfolk' was last year's hit at the Royal National Theatre.
The play premiered in 1965, and appeared in 66 Russian theatres that year, it was first performed in the UK in 1967, with a cast comprising Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Ian McShane. (PNO Note: This is the second time Paul has performed in a play in which Sir Ian McKellan has previously appearred - the first being 'Long Day's Journey Into Night')
Nearly a million people died in the German army's 1941 siege of Leningrad. The survivors lived under a double burden. Not only had these "lucky ones" experienced terrible things, but they also felt bound to create a better future, so that the sacrifices of those who didn't make it would seem worthwhile.
In Alexei Arbuzov's play teenagers Lika, Marat and Leonidik are first glimpsed in the late winter of 1942, dreaming of a future where they are a doctor, bridge-builder and poet, and falling in love. Out of the ashes of their childhood comes peace. Marat and Leonidik return from the war to find Lika studying to be a medic. But three into two won't go: one of the young men vows to go away forever, leaving Lika to marry the other. Flash forward to the end of 1959 and we see whether they have fulfilled the promise of their youth.
Arbuzov's play, with its study of postwar reconstruction and the post-Stalin era, must have seemed ironic enough on its premiere in 1965, but viewed with the benefit of historical hindsight it is simply heartbreaking. For Lika, Marat, Leonidik and millions of other Soviet citizens, the brave new post-war USSR was a bitter disappointment.
Despite a new English version by Nick Dear, Arbuzov's play still seems as clunky and outdated as a Five Year Plan. In another life Arbuzov would almost certainly have forged a successful career as a script writer for TV soaps, such is his enthusiasm for love triangles and episodic scenes that end with a cliffhanger. These give Nicolas Kent's production a jerky, stop-and-start quality that is exacerbated by the use of a white curtain upon which grainy black-and-white images of the siege are projected. Atmospheric, but perhaps a sign that the drama itself is incapable of conjuring a complete world.
The young cast wrestle manfully to make you care, despite dialogue that is earnest and stilted. Alas, the dialogue wins almost every time.
Reviewer's Rating:
Leningrad, winter 1942. Russia is in the grip of war and one of the coldest winters in its history. Freezing weather, starvation and German bombs kill ten times more people than died in Hiroshima. Corpses are left in the street, there is no room in the graveyards and no one has the energy to move them. Such was the inspiration for "The Promise", a play by Alexei Arbuzov, here reinterpreted by Nick Dear.
The first act takes place during the siege of Leningrad, showing how some fatefully survived the terrible ordeal while others collapsed around them in the streets. In the midst of all the horror stands a derelict building, most of whose inhabitants have died from starvation. Lika (Jenny Jules), a girl close to her sixteenth birthday, has crept into one of its rooms to try to get warm. She is roused from a half-starved doze by Marat (Paul Nicholls) whose apartment it is. Tensions soon subside because neither has anywhere else to go. They grow closer, struggling to remain as human as possible amid the destruction outside. Just as they are settling into their misfortunes, Leonidik (Gyurai Sarossy), another orphan of the war, falls into the apartment on the edge of death. On the edge of giving in to cold and hunger these three young people, who have nothing, have stumbled upon each other and thereby founded a permanent comradeship.
The second act relates how that comradeship affects the three of them after the war. They had dreamed dreams together in that room – where Lika and Leonidik still live – in the harsh time of the siege, but in the post-war light of day fear of failure, and the circumstances they find themselves in the post-war Soviet Union, turns the dreams to smoke. Jenny Jules is outstanding as Lika metamorphosing from an ambitious girl into a disillusioned woman, while remaining the pivot around which the lives of Marat and Leonidik turn. Paul Nicholls' is a wonderfully enigmatic Marat, always coming back as if drawn by the thread of fate to that significant room, hiding his fears and failures behind lies. Leonidik, the unfilled poet married to a woman who loves someone else, is tenderly played by Gyurai Sarossy. As the story unfolds it becomes apparent that none of the three can overcome the past.
The world outside the room is portrayed in film between scenes, a panorama of tragic images which comments upon what passes in the room by showing what it helps them to escape. Nicholas Dear's fluent direction, and the cast's strong ensemble performance, together vividly succeed in portraying the travesty of war, and how its legacy of fear, anger and hope affect the lives of those who survive its bitterest manifestations.
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This Page created: 20 December, 2001
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