Enemies: review by The Sunday Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2184816,00.html

The Sunday Times May 21, 2006

Theatre: Spoiling for a fight
Enemies is a blistering study of oppression and revolt, says Christopher Hart

David Hare has been too comfortably ensconced for too long as the darling of the liberal intelligentsia to retain much edge. But his latest venture, an adaptation of an early Maxim Gorky play, is deft, well paced and an excellent piece of work.

Unlike Sir David, Gorky was never comfortably ensconced anywhere, either under the tsarist or Bolshevik regime, continually in prison or in exile from both. An ardent socialist, his disillusionment with Bolshevism was rapid. He finally surrendered to Stalin only in sickly, exhausted old age, accepting the Order of Lenin in 1932. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the “father of socialist realism” was done to death by Stalin’s NKVD in 1936, pour encourager les autres or something.

Enemies was written in 1906 and premiered the following year in cities throughout Russia, despite being officially banned. In some ways, it resembles the work of Chekhov, Gorky’s admired mentor, in its sunny country-house setting and passionate interest in human motivation. But that sunny setting is deceptive, ominously so. There is something at the core of the play not at all Chekhovian: steely political pessimism. (“Maxim Gorky” was a pen name, meaning “Maxim the Bitter”.) In this minor confrontation between panicky bourgeois factory owners and resolute workers, there is little hope of peaceful resolution.

Kind-hearted, weak-minded, blustering Zakhar Bardin (Sean Chapman) is the factory owner whose workers are growing restive. His tough-nut managing director, Mikhail Skrobotov (Sean Gilder), is spoiling for a confrontation. Soon enough, he gets it, rather more violently than expected: threatening the workers with a gun, he himself is shot. The workers then stand together under interrogation, unified in their stubborn opposition to bullying and injustice. Edward Peel, as their spokesman, Levshin, is an especially moving study of ordinary decency. The cosseted family and friends of Zakhar, meanwhile, grow ever more fluttering and feeble.

The acting and characterisation are superlative. Especially good is Gilder, who takes the parts of both the doomed Skrobotov and the hilariously pompous and self- satisfied Captain Boboyedov. Also outstanding is Jack Davenport, with his public-school drawl, doing an excellent Yakov Bardin, Zakhar’s aimless, brandy-swilling younger brother, sunk in comical despair, but then surprising us with the sudden urgency of his love for his wife, the beautiful Tatyana. Amanda Drew is gorgeously seductive and sardonic in this part, while Stephen Noonan, as Skrobotov, gives a little masterclass in less-is-more acting. The scenes between him and Tatyana crackle with a menacing, low-level sexual tension.

Michael Attenborough directs with unflashy dexterity, and the sets are gorgeous, saturated in sunshine by day and magically lantern-lit by night. But most impressive, most refreshing of all, is to have a play from 1906 not principally about love and adultery among the bored middle classes, but about power, labour and revolt, depicted with prophetic intensity. During the interrogation of the suspect workers, we see their fellows, their comrades, standing on the veranda outside the French windows of this bourgeois drawing room. And there they remain throughout Act III, guarded by soldiers, heads bowed to the ceaseless rain, patient as cattle. Knowing that the weather will only get worse before it gets better.

Enemies, Almeida, N1, Five stars