Breaking the Silence

Published Friday 23 May 2008 at 11:35 by Pat Ashworth

Poliakoff’s grandfather was the inspiration for Nikolai, a dispossessed Jewish aristocrat forced under Lenin to take a job as a railway telephone inspector.

Philip Bretherton relishes the role of an arrogant and self-deluding man with contempt for women and an inability to relate to his family. Nikolai uses his journeys into rural Russia to pursue an obsession with inventing sound for talking films, and the action takes place wholly within the shabby railway carriage that is the family’s home.

The narrowing and expansion of the aperture through which the action is viewed gives it a cinematic feel. Clouds of steam coupled with the mighty mechanisms of a moving train are atmospheric and there’s a spectacular trademark ending by the designer, Jamie Vartan. The play labours in the first half and in truth is probably half an hour too long for the intensity of a single setting.

But the four-year interval marking the opening of the second half brings speed and liberation. Nikolai’s submissive wife, Eugenia, played by Diana Kent, once terrified of shedding her stockings, is now a confident working woman. The cosseted son, Sasha (Ilan Goodman), is trying to scuff his indestructibly English shoes in an effort to shake off a privileged background that now embarrasses him.

The feisty maid, Polya (Celia Meiras), best epitomises the reversals brought about by huge world events but the relationship between Nikolai and Verkoff (Owen Aaronovitch), the Commissary who ought to unmask him and doesn’t, is the most subtly drawn. It leaves big questions to ponder.