Theatre

This harrowing story is doubtless being played out for real in the suburbs of Beijing this month. In the run up to the 1980 Olympics, a ‘prostitute putsch’ emptied the streets of Moscow of its undesirable underbelly for three short summer weeks. Alexander Galin, playwright of the dispossessed, trains his eye on a dilapidated mental institution, where a slipshod assortment of these women find themselves in temporary exile.

Each one’s tale, besmeared with betrayal and neglect, is neatly aired. Anna’s describes the making of a philosopher-drunk. Maria’s is still nascent, not a prostitute but an underage unmarried mother, in desperate love with a policeman. But when the unrepentant Klara arrives to take her friend to a private country party, it’s Maria she lures in her stead. Thus, as the city blinds its political eye, the cycle of oppression perpetuates itself.

The dark ache of Galin’s play takes time to grab the heart in Peter McAllister’s slightly ponderous production, which initially feels too small to fill the Riverside’s wide performance space. Emilie Patry is a stunning, delusional Laura, dreaming her way out of her reality by insisting she’s really a trapeze artiste, and Siobhan McSweeny and Rachel Fishwick also make light work of the bruised and defiant women they play. When Maria and Klara return, bloodied and battered from their encounter, the discarded, incarcerated women, rattle the bars of their cage with an increasingly wild, devastating intensity. A deeply affecting night of theatre, made more so by the timeliness of this revival.