Stray Dogs review – Russian poet's struggle against Stalin
In 1935, Anna Akhmatova began writing Requiem in Soviet Russia. Her son, Lev, had just been arrested by the authorities and the poem, published decades later, became a seminal work on Stalin’s Great Terror. It was as much a mother’s lament as a testimony of a nation’s suffering: “Seventeen months I’ve pleaded / for you to come home. / Flung myself at the hangman’s feet”, she wrote plaintively of queuing outside the prison gates every day to receive news of Lev.
Her divided loyalties as a poet and a mother form the central tension in Olivia Olsen’s play. Just as Julian Barnes dramatised Shostakovich’s inner torments over the musical compromises he made to survive Stalin’s regime in The Noise of Time, so Akhmatova is shown going through similar moral and emotional tussles. Shostakovich’s compliance is repeatedly referenced here, although Olsen’s script ruminates on the bravery of Akhmatova’s choice – to sacrifice some poetic principles in order to save her son – alongside its ethical burden.
“Eleven months ago my son was arrested,” she says in the opening scene, in the first of many intimidating meetings with Stalin. “Write constructive poetry,” he urges her, and so the deal is sealed: pro-Soviet poetry in exchange for Lev’s survival.
But for all the motherly anguish, Stray Dogs is overwhelmingly cerebral drama, with scenes almost entirely comprising exchanges about poetry, nationhood and artistic compromise between Akhmatova and Stalin, and also with the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who visits Akhmatova from England and tells her to leave the Soviet Union while she can.
While these are earnest debates which reveal Akhmatova’s reasons for staying put and her resistance through secretly circulated poetry (“create, memorise and burn”), they render the drama static to the point of inaction. Both the set, dominated by Stalin’s desk, and Robin Herford’s direction, add little sense of movement or time passing.
Akhmatova is played by Olsen herself with dignified restraint, though this emotional understatement leaves us further distanced from her suffering. Meanwhile, Berlin (Ben Porter) feels little more than an intellectual foil who teases out Akhmatova’s feelings towards Russia and ideological standpoints. Stalin, played robustly by Ian Redford, is a bigger and more emotive presence on stage. Crude, bullying, petty and megalomaniacal, he shouts obscenities at Akhmatova and forces her to listen to recordings of public applause for his speeches.
Stray Dogs is undoubtedly a play with integrity, illuminating the life and times of a heroic mother and poet. But it is also a play that seems intent on remaining discursive rather than dramatic.
At Park theatre, London, until 7 December.
