Secret/Heart is a new theatre ensemble directed by Seb Harcombe, former Head of Acting at RADA and this production of Vassily Sigarev’s play serves as a showcase for some of the last three years’ of RADA graduates (with the exception of Christopher Hammond). Harcombe, in fact, has already directed the play at RADA and this appears to be a revival of that production, featuring some of the same cast.
Sigarev’s play was first seen in the UK at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2006, directed by Ramin Gray. It’s a bleak portrait of life in a dead-end Russian town, where there is no money and nothing to do with it if you had any. Dima lives next to the cemetery and has been robbing gravestones and selling them on Arkasha for the last few years. The gravestones are running out though and Dima has joined the army. It emerges that joining up is something of a death-wish. He hopes they send him to Chechnya because he doesn’t care if he dies. Tonight is his last night before enlisting and he wants to have a party. His old friend Lera comes over with her snobby teenage cousin Yulka but it soon emerges that Lera wants Dima to lend her money. She has “won a prize” but she can only claim her prize money by “making a purchase”. Dima’s smack-head mate Slavik is lounging on the sofa. A night of drinking and flirting ensues with the possibility of violence lurking just beneath the surface, erupting occasionally.
While the dualism of the play’s world view – lurching from despairing cynicism to mawkish sentimentality – perhaps doesn’t provide the richest of narrative experiences, it becomes clear why this is such an attractive play for a group of young actors to tackle. Sigarev writes vivid, complex and contradictory young characters. The strongest of these is Lera and it is Bethan Cullinane’s performance that steals the show. She captures perfectly the poignancy of Lera’s gullibility (everyone else can see that the “prize-winning” scheme is a con); the way her body has been turned into a commodity by everyone in her life, including her mother who has tried to pimp her out, and the promise of rampant consumerism that the prospect of the prize money seems to offer. None of the rest of the cast have quite Cullinane’s range and nuance, though it has to be said that Scott Karim and Iain Batchelor’s parts as Slavik and Arkasha are comparatively functional. Archer and Gromadzki are energetic and committed but the former is slightly too goofy to convince as a semi-criminal about to go off to Chechnya and the latter is a little too poised and sophisticated to make sense of Yulka’s monstrous teenage power kicks.
Nicolai Hart Hansen’s composite set captures generic post-Soviet grubbiness effectively enough but it seems a pity that the transitions from living room to kitchen or balcony can’t be achieved in a more elegant way than blacking out the rest of the set. The emphasis is definitely on the performances though and Harcombe harnesses the energy of his young cast well. It will be interesting to see whether this company can create work in future that moves beyond feeling like a showcase. As a showcase for Cullinane’s talents in particular though, I can imagine few better platforms than Sigarev’s play. She’s definitely a name to look out for.
