The RSC, formerly known as the Royal Shakespeare Company, launched its four-year Russian project yesterday with a pair of new plays that were a lot better than I’d feared, though not as good as I’d hoped.

I was longing for an announcer to take the stage before The Drunks to say that the show would start half an hour late because the actors were still in the pub.

Alas, no such luck: instead the stage filled with actors in greatcoats swilling vodka, though how on earth they researched this scene I’ve no idea as there is a warped Stalinist working hours ban on alcohol throughout the company, onstage and off.

The second play, The Grain Store, started with the unsavoury sight of members of the paying public filling their faces onstage with the actors in Ukrainian peasant costumes.

As they were told to leave the stage and trudged off in docile, pleased-with-themselves fashion, a real sight for sore eyes, things could only get better.

And they did, except when Kathryn Hunter as a seraphically senile woman memorialising her parents in the present day jumped back in time to become a simian farm worker with a repertoire of tics and face-pulls that only Jack Douglas or Benny Hill could envy.

In between the plays there was a marvellous talk in the Shakespeare Institute — sorry, Soviet Institute — given by the BBC’s star diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall about the unchanging real nature of the Russian people, which explains why both the plays seemed so familiar and curiously non-contemporary.

On my perambulations around town I bumped into Michael Boyd who gave me the most frightful semi-friendly wigging about a previous blog here which he said he’d not read but heard about (it’s amazing how people, all the time, get aerated about things they’ve not seen or read) and threw in my face the fact that the former RSC had won several awards recently, as if that explained everything.

Still, he sounded on good robust form, which you need to be when you run the RSC, and the very least you can say about the opening Russkie (formerly RSC)  season — which comes off soon after it’s opened, like next week; what’s all that about, then? — is that Boyd is certainly doing it because he believes in it. And so, by the sound of it, do the actors.

The grimy, broken down look of it all suits his preferred designer, Tom Piper, too, who is never going to win Boyd any much coveted awards for a pretty Love’s Labour’s or a deliquescent Much Ado.

The company fuelled the critics between shows with beef stroganoff and chocolate cake served in Hall’s Croft, home of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her physician husband John Hall.

It was an enjoyable interlude in a fascinating afternoon, one which we may still look back on and admit that it signified the start of a new era in the history of the Bard company keeping bad company with Russian lowlife in Stalin’s groan and peasant land.
 

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.