FringeReview UK 2023
Cold War
Almeida Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, Costume, Dance and Movement Theatre, Drama, European Theatre, Film, International, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Theatre, Tragedy, Translation
Venue: Almeida Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Jon Bausor’s bare functional set says it all. Conor McPherson’s Cold War based on the acclaimed 2018 film by Pawel Pawlikowski directed by Rupert Goold, suggests that like Portia Coughlin before it, this latest Almeida Theatre production wrests a style from a despair. Here too it indicts shabbiness as the postwar ghost choking every hope whilst Paule Constable’s lighting stabs a refraction of time: sometimes pinpoint, sometimes smoky and even lending a hollowed-out feel.
Set in Poland, Berlin (briefly) and Paris 1949-64 it charts the downward spiral of two who can’t live with or without reach other, anywhere. Pawlikowski shows why – including a cut scene of violence. McPherson – in his first work since the Bob Dylan-grounded Girl From the North Country – makes explicit one detail as to why composer Wiktor functions like a broken piano-string. He literally refuses to compose more original material, only arranges.
Cold War ends with a draining-out of hope in Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon; a desolate beauty the cast certainly earn.
Writer Conor McPherson based on the film by Pawel Pawlikowski, Director Rupert Goold, Music Elvis Costello, Music Supervisor Orchestrator and Arranger Simon Hale, Choreographer Ellen Lane, Set Designer Jon Bausor, Costume Designer Evie Gurney, Lighting Designer Paule Constable, Sound Designer Sinéad Diskin, Musical Director Jo Cichonska, Additional Music Simon Hale, Orchestral Management David Gallagher
Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Costume Supervisor Peter Todd, Dialect Coach Brett Tyne, Assistant Director Dubheasa Lanipekin, Assistant Choreographer James Cousins, Music Assistant Manuel Pestana Gageiro, Associate Costume Designer Phoebe Shu-Ching Chan, Associate Musical Director Livi Van Warmelo, Copyist James Humphreys, Sound Associate Bryony Blackler. Folk Music Consultants Warsaw Village Bands, Wigs Hair & Makeup Supervisor Moira O’Connell, Dialect Coach Fabien Enjalric, Language Coach Edtya Nowosielska, Folk Dance Consultant Orleta.
Till January 27th
Review
Jon Bausor’s bare functional set says it all. Conor McPherson’s Cold War based on the acclaimed 2018 film by Pawel Pawlikowski directed by Rupert Goold, suggests that like Portia Coughlin before it, this latest Almeida Theatre production wrests a style from a despair. Here too it indicts shabbiness as the postwar ghost choking every hope whilst Paule Constable’s lighting stabs a refraction of time: sometimes pinpoint, sometimes smoky and even lending a hollowed-out feel.
Set in Poland, Berlin (briefly) and Paris 1949-64 it charts the downward spiral of two who can’t live with or without reach other, anywhere. Pawlikowski shows why – including a cut scene of violence. McPherson – in his first work since the Bob Dylan-grounded Girl From the North Country – makes explicit one detail as to why composer Wiktor functions like a broken piano-string. He literally refuses to compose more original material, only arranges.
Inserting old and new Elvis Costello songs, McPherson and Goold stretch the film’s taut 88 minutes to 2 hours 45; not a musical, but a play with numbers. Even so, some detail is stripped out to streamline storytelling, though a bit of energy in Zula (Anya Chalotra, The Witcher) and particularly Wiktor (Luke Thallon, Patriots) leaks away.
Wiktor’s closed-in accidie hides a stifling guilt preventing him from self-expression, or what Zula taunts him with in her “going over old ground for new potatoes”. Defiant with her own history of abuse and resistance, Zula’s desperation is primary-coloured, affirmative and feels right.
Costello’s often repurposed songs do their best to break this open. Including ‘I Want You’ with its own haunting anchor. A war-battered piano more often than not asserts itself centre-stage: often as baleful witness as Wiktor plays Chopin or his own desultory arrangements.
By this time Chalotra’s clean, powerfully-supported occasionally smoky soprano melds with Thallon’s singing thread of lyricism: it translates from his windblown and duffle-coated affect. Their gaunt chemistry’s believable: a caustic burning to their incendiary love. Briefly though it’s ecstatic.
Musicologist and archivist Irena (Alex Young), who loves Wiktor more than he loves her, travels with him and commissar Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey) to remote Polish villages to record authentic Polish songs, recovering what’s left after Nazi and (whisper it) Soviet occupation. We’re treated to a gallimaufry sung in both Polish and English by the ensemble, transparent with British or Polish accents.
Though Ania (Anastasia Martin, in a crystalline soprano) has the purer voice as Irena claims, it’s the assertive, passionate Zula, not from the mountains but Lodz and quoting Russian films, who entrances both men. Naturally Zula gravitates to Wiktor, with their first duet, the most haunting hook of the evening: “You may say I don’t lie / But I do.”
Yet from the start Zula (unlike Wiktor, we discover) has a bedrock integrity – she assures Ania she’s not stealing her song and they sing it polyphonically (not a folk given). The fact Zula steals a few hearts – and agrees to spy on Wiktor but delivers nothing – is neither here nor there. The fact other characters flit so momentarily though, does feel like something’s been stolen.
It’s particularly the case with Young’s moving and musically involving performance of Irina, quietly dumped by Wiktor and holding out against factory-praising lyrics, both sidelined and arrested – Zula blames Wiktor (we never find out).
That’s not the case with Levey’s magnificent Kaczmarek – a fixer who sees Zula’s potential more clearly than even Wiktor and falls for her too. He’s an East-End Max from The Sound of Music, more sophisticated, infinitely more weary, sibilant with compromise. Yet Levey invests him with a likeable shabby honesty. Kaczmarek takes a decisive role when he tells Zula he knows Wiktor’s defecting in Berlin and she’s thinking of it too. Kaczmarek sees how the future might play out. Levey’s both funny, compelling and ultimately bereft.
Though the film hopscotches countries, we mainly just see Paris where by 1955 Wiktor’s lover poet Juliette (Anastasia Martin again, brisk, warmly knowing) laconically asks if he’s been with whores again. In literally another under-sung role singer Aimee (Kataria Novkovic, conveying Aimee‘s wary, wearily affection despite herself) tells Wiktor “don’t come back”. Aimee makes Wiktor feel transparent, linking the mirror sense the core lovers recognise in each other later, not to any happy effect. The play’s chockful with such telescoped glimpses.
McPherson’s nearly suggested a formula Adorno and Horkheimer would recognise: to choose always and choose always the same. So the original folksong-factory-reset Minister of Culture is now Michel (Jordan Metcalfe) who as a French film director reboots his commissar incarnation, allows others to colonise Wiktor’s arrangements in ignorant smarmy: “you could turn that E flat…” Metcalfe’s oleaginous official echoes the way John Shirley-Quirk appeared in sinister guises in Britten’s Death in Venice. Though he’s not used as the wearily youthful Polish Vice Consul (Eliot Harper) who tries to dissuade Wiktor from returning to certain hard labour, unless he discreetly spies.
Goold and choreographer Ellen Kane punctuate the production with energising routines from early real and faux-folk-dancing to apotheosis in “Rock Around the Clock” and drab catch-up Polish 1964 routines. Several in the ensemble (Ali Goldsmith, Ryan Gosckinski, Ediz Mahmut, Alžbeta Matyšáková, Sophie Maria Wonja) are spotlit; the 13-strong company often at their best in choruses.
There’s still riveting lyrics as in the late-placed ‘He Taught me To Lie’ with “My love picked a poppy the colour of danger/The shade of fast kisses/The thrill of swift exchange”. God, the devil, betrayal thread through to a desolate reprise of that opening duet. Inevitably without the film’s compressed narrative, energy hangs a little in the eddy of a smoky song. Nevertheless Cold War ends with a draining-out of hope in Chalotra and Thallon; a desolate beauty the cast certainly earn.
