Lights go up on a woman standing centre-stage under a bare, flickering bulb. Her skin is a sallow grey, her lips oily red. This is Sonya, the narrator and heroine of U of T alum Hannah Moscovitch’s The Russian Play.
Set in early Stalinist Russia, the play follows the life of Sonya (Michelle Monteith), a teenage girl who works in the village flowershop. Sonya is the subject and diviner of her own story, shifting boldly from scene to scene with a stage magician’s confidence.
Monteith is by turn seductive and frightening, childlike and haggard, and she mediates the gap between the audience and the play’s other characters with incredible fluidity.
When Sonya’s relationship with the charming gravedigger Piotr falls apart, she is forced to leave the small village of Vladekstov. Impoverished and lonely, she takes up with the wealthy Kostya. But under the thumb of the changing Soviet state, Sonya finds herself again abandoned and alone.
As Piotr, Aaron Willis is both ghostly and threateningly vital. With his sweet demeanour, he masks secrets he doesn’t want Sonya to know. By contrast, Shawn Campbell’s bitter, fast-working Kostya is Piotr’s opposite, although the stern Kostya is so emotionally conflicted that it is impossible not to feel some empathy for him. As he grows excruciatingly attached to Sonya, his unrequited love moves him to a terrible act.
Theatre review
The Russian Play
Directed by Natasha Mytnowych
Starring Michelle Monteith, Shaun Campbell, and Aaron Willis
Rating: VVVV / VVVVV
Moving from recollection to recreated memories, the play mimics old, sepia-tinted films, with Sonya setting up the reels. It is up to her to decide what the audience will be shown, and when. Ultimately, she offers a story of love and its bitter remnants. Moscovitch’s finely detailed story is magnificently supported by the production. Natasha Mytnowych’s direction is innovative and dynamic, but she also knows when to let two characters simply be still with each other.
A particularly effective piece of staging came during one of the final moments of the play, when Piotr is looking down on Sonya in a prison cell. In this deeply affecting scene, they realize that they both still love each other, despite the circumstances that separated them in the first place.
Using a bit of theatre magic, Mytnowych created the illusion of Piotr looking down into the belly of Sonya’s cell-Kimberly Purtell’s vivid light design suggesting a pit into which Piotr calls. Sonya looks up into another block of light positioned over her, gazing at where Piotr would be. He hands her a small piece of bread, which she reaches up to take. Although they were beside each other on stage, there was never any doubt that they were separated, one above the other, by the pit that Sonya was trapped in.
Although this is your standard “Russian Play”, within this model is an implication of something more far-reaching. Maybe it’s that Sonya-despite her “shit luck” as she puts it-was fortunate to have experienced genuine love with Piotr, transient though it was, and desolate when it left her.
