Playing the Victim ( Archived )

Reviews

Valya has a most unusual job: playing the victim in crime reconstruction scenes; a regular gig, given that crimes of passion and meaningless murders are as normal in contemporary Russia as a cup of tea. Not that the police are interested in motivation – or justice, for that matter. They just want to clear their job sheets.

Told By An Idiot join forces with director Richard Wilson for the Presnyakov Brothers’ fantastical new farce, which makes surreal dark comedy of the traumas beneath Russia dilapidated urban surface.

As Valya a strong deadpan Andrew Scott moves from one haplessly executed reconstruction scene to another, so a very pungent sense of the new Russia emerges: steeped in age-old bureaucratic corruption, moral ambiguity and spiritual alienation, but struggling too with the new pressures of multiculturalism and recent political history.

The Brothers have moved from the in-yer-face realism of Terrorism their first play to premiere at London Royal Court to a more sublime sense of the absurd; something that Told By An Idiot, with their wilfully visual, burlesque physical style, are more than equipped to dramatise on stage.

Wilson can’t quite resolve the Brothers’s elusive way with narrative the production has the ambient, late-night TV feel of images on a constant loop but the play ‘s curiously playful way with meaning is also, brilliantly, one of its strengths.

Review from performances at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2003

There are no contemporary playwrights with a weirder take on life today than the two authors of Playing the Victim. But then the young Presnyakov Brothers were born in Siberia and beam an unsurprisingly disenchanted gaze upon a rickety Russia.

Their new, gripping black farce, which is rooted in the depressed and sometimes depressing world of Absurd Theatre, begins close to reality and spirals into exuberant fantasy as it describes a Russia thick with bureaucracy, corruption and dogged helplessness. A state of absurdity reigns unchallenged and envelops the action like an old-fashioned frog. And Richard Wilson’s beautiful production for the Royal Court and told By An Idiot, with the smooth scene changes choreographed in stylised slow-motion, captures the right sense of strangeness.

The artful 30-year-old anti-hero, Valya, skilfully played by Andrew Scott with an unrelenting air of dead-pan neutrality that leaves his character shrouded in ambiguity, is a bright university drop-out, living with his simple parents. As if to emphasise his alienation he has chosen a full-time career of playing the victim. This masochistic choice is not what it seems, since he is simply required to play the corpse in police video reconstructions of murders, with a conservative police inspector strutting his crooked stuff.

Valya, impersonating a young woman knifed in a riverside lavatory by her love, a man who drowned his mistress in a swimming pool and one who slaughtered his school friend in a Japanese restaurant, comes up against rigid, regimented Russians. These people, particularly Amanda Lawrence’s wonderfully grotesque waitress in Japanese costume, teeter on the verge of the ridiculous but are still grounded in reality.

The darkly comic scenes reach an absurd climax when Paul Hunter’s investigating inspector himself dies and Valya is required to impersonate two corpses at the same time. The denouement may slip too far into jocular ridiculousness. But the Presnyakov Brothers’ capture a disturbing sense of Russia and Russians beset by anarchy and alienation.

Nicholas de Jongh, EVENING STANDARD, 14 August 2003

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