PASSION, POWER AND A STRONG POLITICAL PULSE

The Daily Telegraph
05.2001

Declan Donnellan, best known in this country for his work with the Cheek by Jowl company, is also a highly acclaimed director in Russia. And though I believe his reputation has sometimes been over-inflated, there is no doubt that his staging of Pushkin's Boris Godunov is a thrilling theatrical event.

He has mounted it with some of Moscow's leading actors, and though some observers were initially sceptical about the idea of an English director tackling a revered Russian classic, it was wildly acclaimed in Moscow as the most successful Boris for a generation. Now the show has come to Britain, as the dramatic centrepiece of the Brighton Festival, before moving on to Warwick and London.

In Britain, Boris Godunov (1825) is best known in Mussorgsky's operatic version, but it comes across here as outstanding blank-verse drama with strong echoes of Shakespeare, whom Pushkin read avidly. As in Shakespeare, there is a satisfyingly clear-eyed analysis of the political process, but there are marvellous moments too when we glimpse the private passions that lie beneath the public facades.

Donnellan's staging is both spectacular and oppressively gloomy. The action takes place on a 20-metre catwalk, with the audience seated on either side. It's a huge, demanding space, but Donnellan and his outstanding company fill it with style, greatly helped by Nick Ormerod's simple, evocative design and Judith Greenwood's atmospherically tenebrous lighting design.

The play is staged in modern dress, so the archaic formality of chanting, incense-clouded Russian Orthodox priests is set against wily political operators in lounge suits. One actor thanked Donnellan for "casting some light on what we are currently undergoing in Russia," and though the parallels aren't laboured, we are clearly meant to catch similarities between the vodka-swigging Boris Godunov and his namesake Yeltsin, while the false pretender to the Tsarist crown, Grigory Otrepyev, is reminiscent of Vladimir Putin in his mixture of cool calculation and ruthless ambition. This is a play whose take on the political pulse is timeless, disillusioned and persuasive. No wonder Pushkin often found himself in trouble with the censors.

With the help of surtitles it is easy to follow the narrative. Godunov succeeds as Tsar after bumping off Ivan the Terrible's only surviving child. In his feigned reluctance to assume the Throne, Boris resembles Richard III, but the marvellously intense actor Aleksandr Feklistov, who seems to exude dangerous corruption from every pore, also recalls Macbeth in his jumpy neurosis and his awareness that he has rendered life joyless by his crimes. His only comfort comes from his own young son who, in a brilliant piece of casting, is played by the same child actor who plays the ghost of the boy Boris killed to seize the tsardom.

Yevgeny Mironov is splendidly charismatic too as Grigory, a young monk who, years after the boy's death, assumes the Tsarevitch's identity to challenge Boriss title to the throne. Mironov is an actor with a chameleon-like quality. He changes his appearance and manner from scene to scene as ambition forces him to assume a succession of roles, starting as a shy student and ending up as a ruthless commander. He also sets the evening ablaze when he woos the icy Polish princess, played with cold fire by Irina Grineva, a pricktease who is fathom-deep in love with power and status. Their angry, erotic encounter by – and in – a pool of water provides a thrill of sensuality at the heart of this cerebral play.

The supporting ensemble is superb, offering passionate, charged performances that remain just the right side of florid, and Donnellan pulls off some terrific directorial flourishes, most notably a violent, blackly comic tavern scene populated by grotesques and whores, and a wild dance at the Polish court.

You leave the theater in no doubt that you have seen an intelligent, intensely absorbing production of a masterpiece.