Vanya is Alive – Omnibus Theatre, London.

Writer: Natalia Lizorkina

Director: Ivanka Polchenko

Seldom has a stage been quite so bare as the performance space at Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre, stripped back to the walls for five performances of Natalia Lizorkina’s monologue Vanya is Alive. Out of the audience and onto the theatre floor steps Nikolai Mulakov, in jeans and a hoodie; he greets the other people in the space, he names the characters he will present, he nods to the board operator, the lights dim, and he begins his story.

It is a banal, uninflected, undramatic story. Alya is an ordinary Russian mother with a son, Vanya, in the army. But the army isn’t fighting anyone, there’s no conflict, Vanya is well-nourished; Vanya is absolutely free. These are facts. People in authority tell her they are facts. Her neighbours insist on it, shop assistants don’t want to look at pictures of her absolutely free son, and when he arrives home in a box she celebrates his absolute freedom by standing out on the street with her ikon, which is happy and smiling because of the absolute freedom. Her celebration results in her incarceration in a private cell, where she can enjoy her own state of well-nourished absolute freedom in a country where no war is taking place.

The matter-of-factness of Nikolai Mulakov’s delivery, a heavily (Russian) accented sing-song; the details of Alya’s life with her son – his favourite biscuit is the Digestive; the hour-long monologue takes the audience into a very bleak place with very little effort and no dramatic arm-twisting. For an hour, Mulakov holds the stage, moving less and less so the squeaking of his trainers on the theatre floor fades, enjoying tighter and tighter areas of light to stand in. This is theatre at its rawest, its most basic. The performance is pitch-perfect, the lighting enhances the performance, the writing is telling, timely, terrifying. A stand-out performance piece that speaks of everyday evil without any resort to dramatics. Brilliant.

Runs until 8 February 2025