Writer: Fraser Grace
Director: Paul Bourne
Fraser Grace’s adaptation of Russian writer Andrei Platonov’s short story The River Potudan was originally planned to play at the Finborough in 2020. However, the inevitable Covid delays have given the piece’s tale of the aftermath of Russian war a sense of tragic relevance.
Jesse Rutherford’s sallow-faced Nikita is a haunted man, having fought in Russia’s civil war. As he returns to his home town, the land is gripped in famine; between the war and starvation, it feels like someone just being alive is newsworthy.
Nikita’s growing relationship with childhood friend Lyuba (Bess Roche) is slow and tentative. Initially distrusting of her attempts to train as a doctor (“Too late for the dead, the living are healed”) there is the sense of the pair clinging to each other for warmth rather than for love.
Rutherford casts a haunting presence over proceedings, his traumatised soldier struggling to connect with anyone, including the boorish father who saw his son head off to war a boy and come back a broken man. Patrick Morris’s Mikhail is a broad, crude antithesis to his reticent son; together with Caroline Rippin as Lyuba’s feisty friend Zhenya, he provides some lightness to counteract the unrelenting gloom surrounding the central characters.
The dark tone is enhanced by Jeremy Killick casting an ominous presence as a tramp who may or may not be a manifestation of Nikita’s PTSD-induced poor mental health. Certainly every time Nikita seems to be on the mend, interaction with the tramp is enough to pull him back down. Director Paul Bourne handles the ambiguity around the character well, helped by Killick’s silently domineering portrayal.
Where Bliss struggles is maintaining the story as a full-length piece. At over two and a half hours, the piece feels like it is mistaking languorousness with depth. An Act II that sees Nikita leave the home he was setting up with Lyuba, encountering Morris and Rippin as comedy rustics and Killick as a Soviet update of Gogol’s Government Inspector, adds little in the way of enlightenment to the ex-soldier’s plight.
The constant allusions to the river running through Nikita and Lyuba’s home town are more powerful. Nikita found his way home by following the course of the river upstream, but once home it becomes a symbol of the freedom and escape from trauma that he craves.
Talk of the Russian civil war being the “last war” – echoes of World War I’s “the war to end all wars” – carries a fatalistically ironic burden here, amplified by Putin’s campaign against Ukraine a century later.
Platonov was vilified in his lifetime for cataloguing the difficulties of a famine-wrecked Russia that ran counter to the Soviet wish to be seen as a successful republic. In the intervening years, themes of the effects of war on soldiers and civilians have been fertile ground for drama; for all its longueurs, Bliss feels like a worthy addition to the canon.
Continues until 11 June 2022
