Royal Court, London
How do we view the past? Do we forgive and forget, or keep alive ancient animosities? The questions may seem academic. But they are a living issue in Latvia where every 16 March veterans of the Waffen SS march through Riga, to celebrate not just national independence but the struggle against the occupying Soviet army in 1944. And it this event which dominates Aleksey Scherbak's play which I admired for its dramatic skill but which left me uneasy about its message.
With remarkable economy, the Ukrainian-born Scherbak offers us multiple perspectives on the march. His focus is on the generational split in one Russian family. Sasha, the patriarch, is opposed to his teenage daughter, Anya, joining the anti-march protesters; when he appears on the TV news arguing it is time to end "this uproar over these old men", he is falsely branded a Nazi sympathiser. But Scherbak takes the argument further by showing us rival old-timers. One neighbour of Sasha's is a Soviet army veteran, who keeps his sniper's rifle in his wardrobe in case it is needed; another is a Latvian nationalist who defiantly marches in the parade.
Scherbak offers a vivid portrait of a deeply divided country. And I am no position to doubt his claim that the ambitious young use the ethnic conflicts for their own ends: one sharply satirical scene shows Latvian and Russian activists shedding their ideological differences in order to swap trade gossip. But, while the play is hugely informative, it implicitly endorses Sacha's argument that it's time to stop making a fuss about a few parading veterans. Given that 70,000 Latvian Jews were murdered by Hitler, and that even today Latvia contains extremist parties, that seems to me asking a lot. Scherbak may be right that we should not be obsessed by the past; but neither should we deny the potency of historical memory.
However one feels about Scherbak's thesis, his play is persuasively translated by Rory Mullarkey, beautifully directed by Michael Longhurst for the International Playwrights season, and admirably designed by Tom Scutt in the Theatre Upstairs: his cleverest, Ayckbournian idea is to merge the play's three separate apartments so the Latvian and Russian occupants end up sharing the same space. The acting is also first-rate. Michael Nardone catches perfectly the contradiction of the domestically inflexible, politically tolerant Sasha, and Ruby Bentall as his militant daughter blazes with righteous conviction. There are fine performances from Sam Kelly as an unrepentant old marcher, and Ewan Hooper as his more moderate friend. The play adds greatly to our understanding of Latvia's predicament even if its plea to put up with the Waffen SS parade strikes me as stretching forgiveness too far.