Привет, Moscow calling!

So this is where I’m spending my year abroad, in the capital of the Motherland, and so far it’s been great! Moscow is a city with a character, a culture, a vibrancy that are at times breath-taking and at times nerve-tingling.

Let’s begin with the ‘breath-taking’ part. Moscow has a traffic problem. Before I came to Moscow, I received a message from one of my friends saying ‘Welcome to the city of traffic jams’. As a distinguishing feature of any city, I thought this was a slightly odd choice and somewhat at odds with Oxford’s epithet ‘the city of dreaming spires’. Sadly, there’s no punting here … but there a LOT of traffic jams!

This being the case it’s probably for the best that I don’t own a car. Moscow drivers can only be described as ‘crazy Russians’, capable of carrying out the most daredevil (life-threatening?) manoeuvres preferably performed on the busiest roads. On the plus side, they’re now taking zebra crossings seriously, but instead of the driver stopping for a pedestrian ready to cross, the attitude here is that if you’re not on the crossing, no one’s going to stop for you. Which is problematic if you’re not too comfortable with stepping out into the path of onrushing traffic.

Which brings me quite neatly onto the ‘nerve-tingling’ aspect of life in Moscow. Here order and chaos vie for supremacy and like all big cities Moscow can be a tad intimidating to the newcomer. Most districts are made up of shabby, Stalinist-era apartment blocks ripe for renovation, these in stark contrast to the eerily quiet neighbourhoods where security guards stand menacingly in the doorways of the sleek luxury dwellings of the Russian elite.

This dichotomy of life in Moscow is also apparent in the somewhat schizophrenic, East/West mindset of the city. Whilst you can get just about any Western brand in any one of the numerous shopping complexes, people still have more traditional values. Family is very important, where it’s usual for men and women to adhere to conventional gender roles. Several of my Russian friends of about my age are already married, some even have kids. Crazy.

Despite this schizophrenia, as a place to live, I absolutely love it here. The song ‘Moscow Never Sleeps’ is certainly true. Most shops are open until about 9pm and my local supermarkets are 24 hours. Restaurants stay open until the early hours of the morning. The city is bursting with energy and there’s always something interesting to see or do. There are countless theatres, galleries, concerts, parks that you can visit, and so far I’ve never had a dull moment. Whereas the older generation are a little world-weary (don’t expect a cheery ‘have a nice day’ from the cashier at the supermarket) the younger generation are very friendly, and most would jump at the opportunity to show a foreigner round their native city. They look towards the USA and Britain as cultural role-models in music, film and fashion, which can sometimes be frustrating for someone who doesn’t want to be surrounded with the same things as back home! It’s also now in vogue to send your kids abroad to study, so for a young Oxford lass like myself there’s plenty of work to be found tutoring. One parent remarked that you need to be able to speak English now to succeed in life, which explains this trend.

On the negative side, Moscow does live up to the usual clichés of alcoholism and corruption. At 10am you can see men staggering down the street clutching a bottle of beer, or sprawled across a bench on the metro sleeping off their hangover with everyone else doing their best to avoid them. As for bribery, everyone is aware it goes on, but it’s so ingrained in the system it seems impossible to eradicate. Even for something as trivial as securing a parking space, you need to ‘come to an agreement’ with whomever is in charge. Sometimes, it makes things easier as everyone knows the rules of the game, but most of the time it’s rather tiring. They say that this is a country ‘without limits’, where people can do as they please. The problem is this just causes problems for the poor guys further down the line.

Even the fact that all traffic is stopped when the President and his retinue need to drive through the city shows that life is a struggle here for ordinary people. Having spoken to a few Russians, the dream is to buy a ‘cottage’ in the suburbs, and commute into the capital. This weariness has led to tensions between Moscovites and the immigrants who have come from former Soviet Republics and who are willing to do less-than-appealing jobs for a cheap wage … or turn to crime.

But Russians are also very resilient. I was speaking to an Expat who observed that, if anything ever happened to the electricity or power sources, the Russians would be fine. Most people have a dacha, which they build on their own plots of land, where they can be pretty much self-sufficient, growing their own produce and even keeping livestock. Most Russians have the skills to wire their homes, connect to a water supply, maintain a generator and so on. If anything were to happen, then they would all just go to the dachas, and live off the land.

Like every city, there are positives and negatives. Despite this, I would encourage people to visit Moscow, a place which has been the setting of so many important historical events. It really is quite a unique experience to say the least.

Love, Kit xxx

The most identifiable element to Saved’s plot is the stoning of a baby in a pram by a group of men – one of whom is the child’s father. Macaroon Productions will be staging it in 4^th week, a week after The Death of Maria, where a woman is accused of eating her own baby, and a term after Middle England, which centred on a working class couple who are blamed by the press for the abduction of their own child.

Saved is superficially similar to plays staged recently in the BT, but it was shockingly unorthodox in the 60s. Written by Edward Bond in 1965, who bears a more than passing resemblance to Michael Caine, Wikipedia tells me the script of Saved was “instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK”.

The script charts the lives of South London working class youths whose options have diminished thanks to a brutal economic climate. The first scene I saw showed Fred and Pam, the dead baby’s parents, in prison. Fred (Jack Flowers) gives an intensely physical performance: the pair’s accents occasionally slipped, but the scene’s power lay in the interplay between brusqueness and tenderness between the pair. Pam tells Fred she’ll wait for him: he grunts back, “Yeah yeah, God help us.”

Pam (Madeleine Walker) is softly-spoken at points and incongruously sweet to the man who helped murder her child: the psychology behind her submissiveness will presumably be examined over the show’s two hour run time.

Another scene showed Pam’s mother, Mary (Lara McIvor) and Pam’s ex-boyfriend, Len (Marcus Balmer) at home. Mary is on her way out to a film with a friend, Len is polishing his shoes. They talk like a mother and a son, albeit a mother and son who bring up sex a little too often. McIvor’s lilting, assured delivery of lines means the audience is happy to settle in to observe.

This sense of security is swiftly shattered by Bond’s script. A run in Mary’s stocking needs to be fixed. It’s on her lower thigh, on the inside, just above her knee. The audience cringes as Balmer leans in to sew it up, his awkwardness visible on his face. Then he relaxes; the audience cringes more. He talks about how soft her skin is, and asks her repeatedly to stay at home with him.

McIvor is the perfect mixture of Madonna and seductress: she knows exactly what she’s doing, but leaves him in a whirl of handbags and motherly chiding. Balmer is left alone on the sofa: he happily unzips his trousers for a wank, a knowing smile playing across his lips.

Saved’s script is not comfortable. But it’s entertaining, human and engaging, and the cast are clearly having a lot of fun.

Saved is playing at the BT Studio from Tuesday 5th to Saturday 9th November. Tickets are available here

★★★★★

Five Stars

In a comedy review one can’t really mention ‘Nazi’ and ‘camp’ in the same sentence. But this is a play about camp Nazis. Sort of. Mel Brooks’s The Producers brings Hitler to the stage in an outrageous, rumbustious musical satire, a nonstop assault on good taste (perfect fare for students?). Almost everyone remembers the film of the play. I haven’t seen it, so this was my first view of Broadway razzmatazz, as interpreted by the Oxford student theatre group DEM Productions, who won acclaim in Edinburgh earlier this year with their genre-busting philosophical-legal musical A Theory of Justice: The Musical.

The action centres around two entrepreneurs, Max Bialystock, producer of serial Broadway flops, and his timid accountant Leo Bloom. They plan a lucrative scam: put on the worst play in the world and when it closes after the first night make off with the investors’ money. Following a sort of anti-X Factor talent search, they pick Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.  Of course, the ‘actors’, not in on the scam, are playing it straight – although straight is hardly the word for the screamingly gay Roger De Bris (James Skinner) and his camp camp followers. The stage is set for a play within a play, and we the audience are ‘the audience’. (Bialystock’s last production was a musical Hamlet.) But will it be a flop or a hit? Certainly for the packed house on opening night ‘a very palpable hit’.

The two leads, totally immersed in their roles, are perfectly cast. Jack Herlihy as Bialystock has the winning deviousness of a slick-haired Fagin and the one-liners of Groucho Marx. Stephen Hyde as Bloom brings a convincing hysteria to the less exciting role. And some of the supporting performances are equally memorable. Skinner as the gay actor playing a goose-stepping Hitler, provokes roars of laughter with his posturing expressions. His equally flamboyant assistant Carmen Ghia (Alex Wickens) combines physical comedy and perfectly timed delivery.

A lot of the humour comes from ‘offstage’ out-of-character asides, as when Bialystock, half way through a Bronx aria, calls ‘intermission’ and drops his accent. Tributes to other musicals abound, from the ‘I feel pretty’ chords that accompany a flounce from Carmen Ghia, to Bialystock’s speak-singing that recalls Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

This is not a history play, or a historical musical. I’m not at all sure what it is except for a great night in the theatre.

Hitler, camp? But you already knew that, didn’t you.