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This is a grinding production – in every sense. Opening the Arcola’s Revolution season (it’ll be followed by Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’), ‘The Lower Depths’ aims high, but misses its targets.
In a slum property run by a cruel and corrupt couple who squeeze every penny out of their near-destitute tenants, an old man, Luka, arrives whose stories spark hope in the assembled crowd of Russia’s abandoned or rejected citizens.
Playwright Maxim Gorky produced ‘The Lower Depths’ in 1902, when social inequality in Russia was already stark – a tinderbox awaiting the spark of World War One and the subsequent turmoil that would explode into revolution in 1917.
It’s a play of social conscience, turning a spotlight on the forgotten or reviled and sketching in the details of their lives. But it creaks with age, even when tempered by Jeremy Brooks and Kitty Hunter-Blair’s translation. It’s full of speeches that bulldoze repeatedly through the same themes.
As Luka, a bumbling, beanie-wearing Jim Bywater nicely undercuts some of the more overblown moments. Blunt sparks of humour – capitalised on by most, if not all, of the cast – are a saving grace here. They reinvigorate the play when its sense of self-importance risks becoming deadening.
The cast of mainly older actors bring to battered life characters who are far from paragons of poverty, but still victims of their circumstances. Referring to each other by their professions (or their crimes), they could just be archetypes. But the likes of Jack Klaff’s permanently drunk, Keith Richards-esque Satin are well realised.
But these are isolated shafts of clarity in a production that eventually feels endless. The show is nearly three hours long, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem. What is a problem is its aimlessness and repetition. The second half has more near-endings than ‘The Lord of the Rings’.
There could be a way of making this unrelenting sameness work in favour of the play (although, equally, an edited version wouldn’t be unwelcome). But, in spite of surround-sound effects and a flexible, split-level set, director Helena Kaut-Howson’s production really struggles to keep you from checking your watch.