★★★★☆
Vanya is Alive follows a mother, Alya, whose son Vanya is (not) captured and (is) absolutely free. It is a one-man show and there are no set dressings or costume changes. It is a play by exiled Russian artists, written in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The characters have Russian names, but the blank nonspecificity of its theatrical choices enacts a sweeping critique of authoritarianism and censorship that speaks beyond spatial and temporal borders.
In the intimate black-box theatre, actor Nikolay Mulakov prefaces the play proper by making lighthearted jokes with his audience. “Do you speak Russian?” he asks an unassuming audience member, “You do know it’s a Russian play?” He exchanges some laughs with the front row before asking, “Okay, are you ready?” and returns to the stage in performance mode. But he has already broken the wall between reality and performance. Despite this casual, amusing tone, something is already amiss: we know this actor isn’t here to make us laugh; we’ve seen the show’s posters and read the tag lines – we are watching a play about state oppression and authoritarianism. Before the play even begins, the cryptic and coded Vanya is Alive has given us some of the tools we need to start deciphering it.
The playful repeated exclamation “Vanya is alive” soon begins to sour – “Vanya is alive” at his funeral, “Vanya’s friend was not arrested” can’t be right, and thus the audience begins to decipher the Orwellian newspeak, the primary conceit, of the play. We hear a powerful censorship in action and one which forces its audience to work harder to comprehend what lurks beneath what is said. Despite minor line slip-ups from Mulakov, the play’s use of language remains powerful and becomes even more so with the context that it has been translated from Russian and performed in Kazakhstan, Israel, France, Spain, Serbia, Georgia, Germany, Sweden, and Finland.
In the studio theatre, with the sound of London cars and sirens outside just perceptible, ambiguous noises from inside the theatre seem unclear as to whether they belong to the performance or not. Yet with this further, albeit not entirely intentional, dismantling of the fourth wall, the play’s own use of sounds becomes doubly effective. It is only once the play’s characters have deemed Alya a lunatic, only once she is (not) going to die, that we are allowed to hear the truth in plain language: “Vanya is dead and Alya cries, Alya howls like a wolf, Alya tears her hair out, Alya lacerates her skin.”
After the truth has been withheld for so long, these words cut to the bone. The play is almost eerily silent until its end, and so when the sound of a quiet scream seems to come from behind a closed door, it is especially disturbing, and as it is soon followed by a melodic humming from the seat behind me, Vanya is Alive offers few comforts in its blurring of diegesis, of language, and of truth.
Vanya is Alive fits well within the Omnibus Theatre’s lineup of political theatre but I do hope it continues to be performed in theatres around the globe. Its critique of political censorship is timely, and its sparse, low-budget staging reminds us how, even when it seems one has nothing, the seeds of resistance can grow.
Vanya is Alive runs at Omnibus Theatre, Clapham until February 8.
JADAR 