The Suicide

Nikolai Erdman Downstage Dir. Phil Mann

"The truth, and not a bloody bit of paper anywhere to write it on," mutters Semyon Podgsekainikov, the hero of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide. Nor a stage to act it on. The play was banned when first produced in 1932 and has never been performed in Russia.

It's not really surprising that Stalin had reservations about The Suicide. After all Semyon is hardly your identikit prole hero - tripling production targets or powering past effete Westerners at the Olympics. Rather he is that staple of farce, the disenchanted little fellow. Unemployed and unimpressed with Stalin's ideal society he decides to end it all. "Life is wonderful," cries one of the characters, attempting to dissuade him, but it soon becomes apparent that this regulation ridden, authoritarian world is far from the best possible.

Erdman slyly points to the dismal reality not reported in Izvestia when he lifts Gogol's exultant passage in Dead Souls about a troika like Russia hurtling along to meet its destiny and gives it to one of his characters - who is promptly warned against speeding: "I suggest you adapt your metaphors to the regulations."

Individuals are also expected to conform within certain limits. Semyon complains, "I wanted to be a genius, but my parents were against it." Irregular components might cause society to malfunction. And an individual has no importance as such - only in so far as s/he relates to society.

Art, accordingly, exults not individuals but their input to society. The Marxist postman Egor, played with opportunistic relish by Colin McColl, delivers the official line: "I must stress once again that I am a postman, and what I want to read about is postmen."

Egor has no difficulty adapting Hamlet's decadent self-absorption into something more socially relevant: "We have just this moment received information from Comrade Marcellus that all is not well in the state of Denmark the rottenness of capitalism cannot but reveal itself."