With her first mainstage Shaw production, The Russian Play has shown director Diana Donnelly to be a shining talent.
Shaw Festival 2019/The Russian Play by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Diana Donnelly, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake, July 6 to Oct. 12. Tickets available at shawfest.com.
The lunchtime theatre is a long-standing tradition at the Shaw Festival. Over the years, these short plays, both comic and tragic, have acted like an amuse-bouche for the rest of the festival playbill. They have also introduced Shaw audiences to an eclectic range of playwrights, from the known to the unknown. This season’s inspired lunchtime choice is Hannah Moscovitch’s The Russian Play, and judging from the rapturous response of the audience, the already much-lauded Moscovitch has acquired a whole new fan base.
The Russian Play, Moscovitch’s second, launched her run to greatness. It debuted at Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival in 2006, followed by a mainstage remount at Factory Theatre in 2008. Since then, it has travelled across the country and south of the border to great acclaim. The short one-act contains all the Moscovitch-isms we’ve come to admire from this outstanding Canadian literary talent. She is a provocateur, part satirist, part realist, part humourist, whose characters live on the edge. At her heart, however, Moscovitch is a humanist, and how people cope in awful circumstances is her usual focus. The trials and tribulations of the human condition are where she finds her strongest material.
In The Russian Play, the narrator is Sonya (Gabriella Sundar Singh), a sixteen-year-old flower shop worker in a small town. It’s the 1920s, and Stalin is consolidating his brutal power. Sonya’s play-long monologue is filled with self-deprecating humour, one of Moscovitch’s long suits, which makes her absolutely endearing as a character. She also breaks the time wall by talking about present-day Russia as well as the Stalinist era, and her observations are very astute, if not downright provocative. As she tells us, she is Stupid Sonya, the play is about a shitty love story, and Russia is a shitty country. We’ll find none of the grandeur of Chekhov and Tolstoy here, she reminds us.
Sonya’s stock in trade is her good looks. In fact, it is her only asset. She first attracts Piotr the gravedigger (Peter Fernandes), and then Kostya, the kulak’s son (Mike Nadajewski), and her relationships with both men lead her to grief. The minute she runs into the shitty part of love, as she calls it, her fate is sealed. The fourth character on stage is violinist Marie Mahabal, whose role is far more than musical accompaniment in Diana Donnelly’s clever direction.
Just in her second season at Shaw, Singh is an absolute delight, casting a spell over the audience as she executes Sonya’s wry wit and droll delivery in her adorable faux Russian accent. Her Sonya is always brutally honest about herself and her situation, and she touches the heartstrings with the unabashed truth of her pitiful existence, but even at Sonya’s worst moments, Singh makes us smile. In the end, Sonya is the epitome of the Russian zeitgeist with her acceptance of fate and resignation to a sad end. What an intelligent actor Singh is, knowing how to nuance her words for maximum effect. In Sonya, Singh has given us an unforgettable performance.
While Sonya’s character has been richly developed, Moscovitch has written the men as cyphers. The playwright is interested only in their overriding qualities as they affect Sonya. Thus Piotr, is the warm-fuzzies and Kostya is the hard-nosed man of power. Both actors do their job very well. Fernandes is a fountain of love, simple, uncomplicated and unassuming. Nadajewski is vain, spoiled and wilful. For her part, violinist Mahabal acts as both the conscience of the playwright and a reflection of Sonya’s inner soul. As designed by music director Ryan deSouza, Mahabal performs everything from plaintive cinematic accompaniment to shattering sound effects. Her violin proves to be a very versatile instrument indeed.
The Russian Play is Donnelly’s first mainstage Shaw production, after moving through the directing ranks with stints as assistant director and helming workshops. With this production, she has shown herself to be a shining talent. The imaginative Donnelly certainly understands the use of symbols, which is an exciting quality in a director. Gillian Gallow’s set contains one iron frame bed and a floor covered with dead leaves. The bed keeps swinging to different positions, changing with the shifts in Sonya’s fortunes. The leaves are another instrument for violinist Mahabal, who throws them around to indicate chaos, rage, danger, heart-break and a multitude of other emotions and situations. The leaves have been given their own clever orchestration.
Donnelly has been meticulous in her stage action, and there is not one gratuitous move on the part of any character. Each action and reaction has been calculated to underline the deeper meaning of Moscovitch’s script. The production moves with the beauty and precision of a Swiss watch. Gilding the lily are Michelle Ramsay’s very impressive lighting, Gallow’s effective period costumes, and Esie Mensah’s charming choreography. Choosing the subversive rap of Pussy Riot, the militant all-female Russian rock band, to begin and end the show, is also representative of Donnelly’s adroit directing choices.
In short, Moscovitch’s The Russian Play is a picture-perfect production, hard-hitting yet sweet.
LUDWIG VAN TORONTO
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