Remembrance Day

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Date	Time	Venue	Notes	Prices	Booking Link
Available Performances
Dates in March
Fri 18 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available, Preview	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 19 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available, Preview	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Mon 21 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available, Preview	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Tue 22 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available, Preview	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Wed 23 Mar 2011	7:00pm	Press Night	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Thu 24 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Fri 25 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 26 Mar 2011	3:00pm	Concessions Available, Saturday Matinees	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 26 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Concessions Available	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Mon 28 Mar 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Tue 29 Mar 2011	7:45pm	Post-Show Talk	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Wed 30 Mar 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Thu 31 Mar 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Dates in April
Fri 1 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 2 Apr 2011	3:00pm	Concessions Available, Saturday Matinees	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 2 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Mon 4 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Tue 5 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Wed 6 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Thu 7 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Fri 8 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 9 Apr 2011	3:00pm	Concessions Available, Saturday Matinees	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 9 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Mon 11 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Tue 12 Apr 2011	7:45pm	Captioned Performance	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Wed 13 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Thu 14 Apr 2011	3:00pm	Concessions Available, Mid-Week Matinee	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Thu 14 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Fri 15 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 16 Apr 2011	3:00pm	Concessions Available, Saturday Matinees	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 16 Apr 2011	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sold out Performances

Reviews

5 stars Paul Taylor, The Independent, Friday 25th March 2011

Watching Aleksey Scherbak’s extraordinarily powerful Remembrance Day, I kept thinking how deeply both Mikhail Bulgakov and Sean O’Casey would have appreciated its human and artistic qualities. Scherbak, like them, has the gift of showing how appalling tragedy and hapless comedy restively malinger in a perpetual, untidy coexistence, especially in societies that are corrosively divided.

The play’s simple, eloquent staging further intensifies the mixed moods of black humour, desolate pathos and dark foreboding in Michael Longhurst’s splendidly acted production. The play is set in a block of flats in the Latvian capital of Riga. Living cheek by jowl, though not on speaking terms, in stark apartments are figures who betoken the bitter legacy of the country’s contentious past. In the sharply paradoxical stage picture created here, it’s as though their separate living quarters have been superimposed on each other so that implacable foes and pained moderates drift around the one communal space, unwittingly sitting side by side at a kitchen table, and promiscuously arriving and departing through the same row of front doors on Tom Scutt’s uncluttered, vivid design.

The dramatic events are triggered by Latvian Legion Day, the annual procession through Riga of Nazi Waffen SS veterans and other native Latvians in commemoration of those who fought against the Soviets even if that meant getting into bed with Hitler. Preparing to join in her first anti-fascist demo is young Anya, whose unnerving zeal and the emotional hurt and confusion that underpin it are brilliantly communicated by Ruby Bentall. Her parents are ethnic Russian and, while accompanying her to keep her out of trouble, the girl’s father, Sasha (a movingly troubled Michael Nardone), gives an impromptu interview to a pro-Russian television channel and makes a plea for toleration, arguing that it is time “to end this uproar over these old men”. He’s falsely branded a Nazi sympathiser and it’s not long before swastikas are painted on their doors, his wife sacked, his daughter murderously alienated from him, and his apolitical son embroiled in street violence.

Written under the auspices of the Royal Court’s remarkable international department and robustly translated by Rory Mullarkey, Remembrance Day superbly complicates your sense of the intractability of the situation. There’s a gloriously tragicomic and O’Casey-esque double-act between an unrepentant nationalist veteran (Sam Kelly) and his more sensitive sidekick (Ewan Hooper) who points out that he has fought in four armies in the course of his life. It’s typical of the play’s wrong-footing myriad-mindedness that just when you tensely think it’s an assassin’s knock at Sasha’s door, it turns out to be the Kelly character paying a reluctant call to thank him for medical help. The play is, by turns, heartbreaking, beadily satiric and humorous.

Can we let go of old animosities without betraying the victims of past injustice? I don’t think the play straightforwardly endorses Sasha’s brooding tolerance. Certainly, it shows us how some unlovely young activists in Latvia keep the rifts open as a cynical career move.

Unreservedly recommended. 4 stars Maxie Szalwinska, The Times, Sunday 3rd April 2011

If the prospect of a play about Latvia overwhelms you with gloom, think again. This one has a sombre wit, and Michael Longhurst’s production is anything but a chore.

The playwright Aleksey Scherbak trains his sights on the annual march through Riga to commemorate the soldiers who fought against the Red Army as part of the Waffen-SS. Anya (Ruby Bentall), a newly politicised ethnic Russian teenager, is determined to take part in an anti-fascist demo on Latvian Legion Day. Her more passive father believes it’s time “to end this uproar over these old men”. When he says so in a television interview, he is branded a Nazi sympathiser. Scherbak’s characters include codgerly, vodka-gulping veterans bickering over the war, and he makes subtle judgments between extremes of praise and blame. His sourest contempt is for the cynical game-playing of political parties. 4 stars Libby Purves, The Times, Friday 25th March 2011

The rewards of small-scale theatre can be huge. You turn up in dutiful willingness to spend 90 minutes learning about contemporary social tensions in Riga, as seen by Aleksey Scherbak. What you get is a little masterpiece of power, wit, and heart relevant to everywhere, its bitter clarity echoing Sean O’Casey’s cry of “Time we had a little less respect for the dead, an’ a little more regard for the living!”

Every March 16, ethnic Latvians mark Legion Day, commemorating local soldiers of the Waffen SS and old men parade in uniform.

Nationalists use it to excoriate the many Russian speakers settled in their midst for generations, using the old men as symbols of resistance to the Soviets. In return the Russian Party marches under the banner of anti- fascism and the TV rants “Look at the faces of these soldiers. Maybe one torched villages and raped women.”

But old Valdis — who in the chaotic years perforce wore three uniforms including his Waffen SS one (though always the same boots) — is fragile now. So is his mate Paulis (who also committed no atrocities, but stood bored on guard duty and festered in a prison camp). Paulis, a comically absurd Sam Kelly, is a daft old bigot who says Russians drop litter. Valdis (Ewan Hooper, also excellent) would prefer to shrug it all off and play chess with neighbour Misha, a Soviet army veteran. Misha is idolised by his Russian Party extremist niece, the hysterical Anya. Yet when Paulis collapses and Anya — a medical student — turns her back spitting “They are not people!”, Misha lends his oxygen mask.

The complications are clearly laid out, the cast without accent or affectation. Anya’s father, played with heartbreaking decency by Michael Nardone, tries saying to the TV cameras “No need for uproar over these old men . . . they’re just like us, only they’ve seen much more hardship.” He gets pilloried as a fascist, his wife loses her job, Anya walks out to be a martyr. Her teenage brother — against cliché, it is not women pleading for reason but men — only wants to be modern. “The world’s changed, there are no borders, people live wherever it’s best to live. And that’s fine. It’s been fine for ages!”

It’s staged in the Court’s upstairs theatre with clever simplicity, one set serving for all three apartments: battered utility furniture, bread and sausage, an old TV.

Sometimes it is the Russian family’s home, sometimes Valdis’s or Misha’s: under Michael Longhurst’s clear direction each group uses the room, remaining still and darkened during the others’ scenes or weaving round one another unseeing, to sit invisible at the same table. More powerfully than any words, that expresses the absurdity of enmity between neighbours.

Pure, brilliant theatre. 4 stars Quentin Letts, The Daily Mail, Friday 25th March 2011

Political hot-potato handled with care

Left-wing MPs sometimes attack the Conservatives for belonging to a broad alliance of European parties whose Latvian counterpart ‘supports the Nazis’.

The outfit in question identifies with the few remaining Latvian veterans who fought for Germany in World War II. Once a year, they have a parade.

Are they really a threat to Latvia’s many ethnic Russians? Or are they just elderly comrades out for a day with medals and vodka?

This is the territory of Aleksey Scherbak’s informative but too-compressed Remembrance Day. It is balanced, showing how on one level the veterans are doddery old boys who can barely cut a loaf, let alone aim a rifle these days.

Yet simply by marching and recalling their youth, are they stirring up Latvian nationalism? Does that in turn provoke Latvia’s ethnic Russians to extremism?

This production is neatly done. Three doors at the back of the stage lead into three flats in the same residence block. One is occupied by a Russian ex-sniper, one by a Latvian former German recruit and his outspoken friend.

The third flat belongs to a family whose father mistrusts politics and wishes everyone could forget World War II. He, inevitably, becomes the victim.

The playwright argues that political parties, on all sides, use history to justify grotty positions. We meet local agents from the nationalist and Russian sides. Both are young men who wear black and have the gift of the gab.

When they bump into one another, they greet each other cordially, like salesmen from rival firms. Sam Kelly and Ewan Hooper excel as the two former German soldiers.

Michael Nardone is the Russian father and Ruby Bentall plays his daughter as she wakes up to political activism. Hearing these Russian colonialists talk about Latvia, one feels they could almost be whites in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.

If British MPs who sound off about Latvia saw this play, they might realise history was a little more complicated than they claim. Do I mean you, Denis MacShane? I do! 4 stars Jane Edwardes, Time Out, Tuesday 29th March 2011

Three adjoining flats are represented by a single space. It’s an apt image of invasion and ignorance for Aleksey Scherbak’s punchy, humane play about the tension between Latvians and Russians in modern Latvia

On Legion Day (which commemorates those who fought as part of the Waffen SS against Soviet Russia), two veterans of Hitler’s army, Paulis (Sam Kelly) and Valdis (Ewan Hooper), celebrate with vodka and sausage. Misha lives two doors down, a tough Soviet army veteran with a rifle in his cupboard. Sasha and his family symbolically and literally inhabit the flat in between: their number includes the fanatical would-be medic Anya, who is determined to demonstrate against the Legionaries and who refuses to help Paulis when he collapses. When Sasha makes some mild impromptu comments on TV about the need to forgive, he is branded a Nazi.

Although it is hard for us to catch every political nuance in a 70 minute play, Scherbak illuminates an intractable situation and possibly plays down the less attractive features of the marching Latvians (some of these people are the Tories’ controversial hardline allies in Europe).

Hostilities should die with the old codgers, but Scherbak pessimistically shows how even when the old are willing to let go, there is a new generation, like Anya, fired up and longing for martyrdom.

Michael Longhurst’s production is first rate and, once again, Elyse Dodgson’s excellent international department persuades us to see the world from a different perspective.

Michael Billington, The Guardian, 24th March 2011

How do we view the past? Do we forgive and forget, or keep alive ancient animosities? The questions may seem academic. But they are a living issue in Latvia where every 16 March veterans of the Waffen SS march through Riga, to celebrate not just national independence but the struggle against the occupying Soviet army in 1944.

With remarkable economy, the Ukrainian-born Scherbak offers us multiple perspectives on the march. His focus is on the generational split in one Russian family. Sasha, the patriarch, is opposed to his teenage daughter, Anya, joining the anti-march protesters; when he appears on the TV news arguing it is time to end “this uproar over these old men”, he is falsely branded a Nazi sympathiser. But Scherbak takes the argument further by showing us rival old-timers. One neighbour of Sasha’s is a Soviet army veteran, who keeps his sniper’s rifle in his wardrobe in case it is needed; another is a Latvian nationalist who defiantly marches in the parade.

Scherbak offers a vivid portrait of a deeply divided country… His play is persuasively translated by Rory Mullarkey, beautifully directed by Michael Longhurst for the International Playwrights season, and admirably designed by Tom Scutt in the Theatre Upstairs: his cleverest, Ayckbournian idea is to merge the play’s three separate apartments so the Latvian and Russian occupants end up sharing the same space. The acting is also first-rate. Michael Nardone catches perfectly the contradiction of the domestically inflexible, politically tolerant Sasha, and Ruby Bentall as his militant daughter blazes with righteous conviction. There are fine performances from Sam Kelly as an unrepentant old marcher, and Ewan Hooper as his more moderate friend.

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