Who precisely is the enemy presently laying waste to Ukraine? There was a time the reply would have been simple. These of us who grew up on this aspect of the iron curtain had been schooled to see the outdated USSR as a dictatorship, an unyielding empire hell-bent on defending its pursuits. There was no ambiguity in such an adversary.
However three many years after the autumn of the Berlin Wall, supposedly a triumph for the west, the character of Putin’s Russia is tougher to find out. For all of the free-market values ushered in since perestroika, it is a nation – and a president – on which the outdated ideology nonetheless exerts a pressure. These formed by communism have cause to consider democracy didn't convey all of them they had been promised.
And if that sounds quite a bit to load on to 2 characters, one embodying Stalinist doctrine, the opposite standing for rootless youth, effectively, it's, however playwright Jack MacGregor makes a good stab at it. His play is heavy with analysis, at instances extra of a dialectical argument than a drama (it might switch seamlessly to radio), however additionally it is an clever try at describing how all of us are formed by the forces of historical past.
His setting is Pyramiden, a mannequin village in Svalbard, now abandoned however as soon as a Soviet coal-mining settlement, with a inhabitants of 1,000, on Norwegian territory. Right here, because the polar evening approaches and the Arctic storms kick off, Rebecca Wilkie’s Slava arrives as backup for Matthew Zajac’s Sasha, a safety guard. They've a whole lot of time to speak and a whole lot of speak to be accomplished, each actors hitting the textual content with vitality and fervour in MacGregor’s manufacturing for Dogstar.
It's a moot level whether or not this remoted outpost is a wasteland or some type of utopia, however even in its vacancy, it holds reminiscences of world energy struggles. Sasha, now not recognising the Russia of right this moment, appears cynically at a world divided by completely different manufacturers of capitalism. Slava, who was 15 when the USSR dissolved, is extra ambivalent, however is outlined by reminiscences of her personal.
If the 2 of them are extra conduits than totally fleshed characters, they nonetheless present how our values are solid by political circumstance and remind us that it pays to know your enemy.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, till 14 August
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