TheatreReviewTheatre503, London
Roxy Cook’s award-winning debut is a whimsical, layered meta-tale about the clash of old Soviet ways and modern, capitalist culture
This play opens just as the title promises. Two narrators tell us the story of an elderly woman (Giulia Innocenti) from old Russia who is stranded in the new Moscow of 2018 that is still high from hosting the World Cup.
She is sold a loan with an extortionate interest rate by a callow, morally slippery bank manager (Sam Newton), even though it is intimated that she is in the early throes of dementia and can’t keep hold of the manager’s name. That action spirals into a tragicomedy, of sorts, narrated by characters-cum-storytellers. They restart again and again, it seems, and the drama appears beguilingly simple but gathers Matryoshka doll-like layers.
Roxy Cook’s debut play, which she directs herself, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, longlisted for the Bruntwood prize, and won this year’s Theatre503 International Playwriting award, and it clearly reveals her talent. The script is playful and plaintive, dripping with black comedy and whimsy – there are fantastically amusing interludes featuring the old lady’s talking cat – until we arrive at the tragic nub.
David Allen’s set design is deceptively simple at first. The old lady’s fifth-floor apartment has ornate wallpaper and floral seats but that realism morphs into something more complicated, and the space turns into a bank and a nightclub.
Compartments appear within the walls of the set and a third character emerges out of them. He is a thuggish debt collector (Keith Dunphy) whose life is interwoven with that of the old lady and the bank manager. Together they are comic but not cartoonish, remaining human and individual, but also representing the clash of old Russia with its Soviet stoicism, and the new, which here seethes with caviar, capitalist greed and credit culture.
The actors bring compassion and nuance to their parts, but the cat, jointly played by Innocenti and Newton, is narrowly the most winning.
It is perhaps a little repetitive, and the meta-theatrical stop-starts initially feel cutesy, but these develop into absorbing, original and sophisticated storytelling. If Italo Calvino had written for fringe theatre, it might well have looked like this.
At Theatre503, London, until 9 December
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