Alya, a Russian mother, worries about her son, Vanya, who has been “sent to the peace”. From the frontline, she receives a phone call to say that he “has not been captured”. She passes a beggar on the street who stresses that she doesn’t need money as she and her children are happy and well-nourished.
Viewers soon realise that this Russia is an inverted world in which words and statements mean their opposite and the truth can only be surmised by reversing lies – the sort of place where a president might call invasion of a sovereign nation “a special military operation”. By the time a judge tells Alya that she has “done nothing wrong” and a doctor sardonically reassures her that she is “not dying”, there is a chill in an audience that has learned this warped talk.
Although the title of Vanya Is Alive invokes a classic Russian drama, Natalia Lizorkina’s 2022 play has no direct connection with Uncle Vanya, though there may be an influence from Chekhov’s early satirical sketches. The biggest debt, though, is to the satires of Gogol and Bulgakov, applied to enduring targets – state militarism, lying leaders – and new ones. A Russian podcaster protects himself by dropping hours of complete silence, although the tactic is doomed to fail in this dystopia as saying nothing clearly implies what would be said if the speaker dared.
There are narrative, characters and ideas enough for a full-length, populous play but Lizorkina has confined them to a one-hour multi-voice monologue, compellingly performed by Nikolay Mulakov under the direction of Ivanka Polchecnko, who also translated the piece. The story is told in reported speech (“the policeman says …”), with minimal ventriloquism of the speakers, giving Mulakov the sound of an ominous oracle. A moment when he shouts has the shock of gunshots and and interludes of silence, which may be podcast extracts, suggests what happens once speech becomes unbelievable.
The piece’s brevity may limit its appeal beyond festivals and small venues but, when its theatrical potential is spent, Vanya Is Alive should surely be recorded and preserved online as an account of the perversion of language and logic by tyrannies in Russia and elsewhere.
• At the Omnibus theatre, London, until 8 February
