Life and Fate - the Plays

Classic Serial – Viktor and Lyuda
I saw the readthrough for this play, and it was impressive even then. Much of this was down to Branagh who absolutely captured Viktor as written by Walker et al: his wry humor, his excitement, his antagonism with Nadya and occasionally Zhenya, his impatience with Sokolov, and embarrassment around Masha. The energy and consummate professionalism he exuded as he performed the readthrough buoyed the rest of the cast. Let’s not kid ourselves; Life and Fate was very well-cast. Many of the actors cast succeeded in changing the way I felt about the characters; Greta Scacchi, Harriet Walter, Ann Mitchell, Ellie Kendrick and Nigel Anthony brought hidden depths to Lyuda, Masha, Alexandra, Nadya and Sokolov, respectively. Partially, of course, this was through their acting but partially just through their voice quality.

Nadya’s skeletal narration works surprisingly well; Viktor’s friends and family in Kazan is a plot thread that wends its way through the novel in a somewhat Naturalistic fashion. The Classic Serial is a very traditional format and the story has been condensed in chronological terms until it, too, has all the elements of a traditional Classic Serial. The opening monologue, taken from Grossman’s letter to Khrushchev, is very powerful and well-played by Branagh, but I wonder if new readers wading in will get to the end of the week thinking that Life and Fate is a memoir by Viktor Shtrum.

Lyuda as a character remains very sympathetic especially during her Tolya scenes, but I think she becomes a ghost in the second half—a flaw in the character that is just part of her makeup. Masha as a character I found quite thin and formed from a diaphanous cloud shaped by her relationship with Viktor (which is quite approaching Bulgakov’s treatment of female characters). Much to my surprise, Walter’s characterization brought a great deal of warmth that matched Viktor tit for tat. Anthony as Sokolov had a similar effect; as so many of the actors in this play proved, he really had a terrific voice.

As far as great voices go, perhaps one problem was the similarity between the voices of Madyarov (Ralph Ineson) and Karimov (Stephen Grieff), both excellent actors in their own rights. However, their voices were rather similar, to the extent that even I who knew what was going on got confused as to who was speaking.

In general, I think the major drama points from this strand were carefully lifted from the book and constructed in play form.

Woman’s Hour—Anna’s Letter
This monologue was read, almost without editing, by Janet Suzman at the BBC/Cambridge event at St John’s College. It was very powerful to hear “live” and through emotion and the characterization provided both by the actress and the writer(s), it works equally well in all three media—as a dramatic monologue, as a radio piece, and, of course, as part of the novel. I remember this being one of the most gripping parts of the book and one that I could most easily imagine being adapted for radio. It is highly appropriate that it follows the Classic Serial part 1 even though they couldn’t in form and content be more different from each other; they are two of the poles that make up Life and Fate and work in tandem and independently of one another, which is part of the beauty of the book.

Afternoon Play—Krymov and Zhenya- Lovers Once
Unfortunately not having been on the scene when David Tennant was recording, I missed most of the Krymov strands of the dramas, which balance nicely with the Viktor strands and do the character of Krymov credit. I remember making a rather ill-advised remark to Raquel Cassidy during the Viktor and Lyuda readthrough. I asked, “What do you think of Zhenya?” “Blimey, that’s a question,” she said, then asked me to elaborate. To me, reading the book, Zhenya’s motivation wasn’t clear. It’s possible I rushed through it and didn’t understand a lot of the nuance; if so, the section that suffered most from my reckless reading. For one thing, I didn’t understand the relationship between Zhenya and Jenny, which Raquel Cassidy and Eleanor Bron bring wonderfully to life. Jenny’s fate is a masterpiece of dramatic subtlety which Jonathan Myerson has brought to the fore with deceptive simplicity. Zhenya’s exasperation with the system is well-expressed. Adrian Scarborough makes a magnificent Limonov, and the way Zhenya sidesteps his manipulation of her and still gets what she wants makes me admire the character much more.

The casting of Tennant as Krymov works surprisingly well. It doesn’t matter terribly to listen to the Krymov strands in order but it helps build up a picture of his unravelling. The casting works partially because he is so well-known in heroic terms. I’m sure that his acting output since Casanova and Doctor Who have shown his more rounded facets to the public at large, but if you had only ever seen him in Doctor Who, you can understand Krymov’s downfall with that much more pathos. Like nearly every character in Life and Fate, from Viktor Shtrum down to Khmelkov, Krymov believes he is in the right. Life has agreed with him thus far (the events in For a Just Cause are alluded to) and when he becomes, as Katia Shulga noted, a victim of time, it’s a bewildering and tragic experience even before you get to the torture scenes in the Lubyanka.

Woman’s Hour—Vera and Her Pilot
This is the introduction to Spirodonov, another character I’m not sure I fully understood when reading the novel. Vera, too, seemed less of a character than an assemblage of traits: she’s young, she’s unmarried, she’s pregnant, she’s in love with a pilot, she’s stuck in Stalingrad with her father who is defending the nuclear power station. Both Vera and Viktorov are very ordinary. Vera’s dead mother is Maruysa, Lyuda’s elder sister who drowned in the Volga. In this sense, this plot thread makes good use of the tonalities available in the Woman’s Hour slot. The use of sound nicely constructs an ambiguity where the peaceful forest of Viktorov’s flying corps can include Vera, even though she is hundreds of miles away.

Afternoon Play—Journey
Like the incidents surrounding Anna Shtrum, I found this part of the novel impossible to put down, and the production team has done an excellent job of adapting it for the aural landscape. In that sense, the horrors are as perfectly viable through sound as they would be through that overly-used cinematic visual sense. You don’t need to see the interiors of the cattle cars because Sofya and the others can’t either; to hear them is enough to evoke all senses, including the sense of cold and the inevitable smell.

The story of Journey is highly complex because it doesn’t focus just on the horror of the bald events—a Jewish woman goes to the gas chambers. Sofya (and this is the point, of course) is recreated as a real person. She is a doctor, she is educated, she considers herself Russian. She has never had any kind of personal relationship until she meets and takes care of David, a displaced boy who is wonderfully underplayed by Laurence Belcher. Alison Hindell commented that some characters in Life and Fate are brave when they don’t have to be, and that is the case with Sofya, who did not choose heroism. By contrast, the slimy Khmelkov (what a role for Henry Devas) considers his position in this constellation of horrors (he closes the doors on the victims after they have been stripped and their hair cut) and finds himself morally unscathed.

Of course, there is the framework from the other side of the spectrum. Samuel West does a wonderful job playing Liss, an intellectual whose brain is frightening, erudite, and suffers from fatal curiosity. He is fascinated by Mostovskoy (Peter Marinker), the old Bolshevik who makes an interesting contrast to Abarchuk later. Mostovskoy and Liss’ game of cat and mouse is fascinating. Eichmann is another contrast to Liss, for whom his superior’s pragmatism is even too much for him to bear. What inspired casting to have John Sessions play this inhuman human being!

Great care has been taken with the soundscape in Journey; the sounds during the final moments of Sofya’s life are more arresting than any tele-visual representation. I think the subject matter risks being maudlin, but with a starkness devoid of any sentiment, the sound cuts right to the heart of the characters. In the second Classic Serial, Lyuda pronounces a chilling, if ignorant, sentence on Sofya. Sofya was Zhenya’s friend, but Lyuda never liked her. “I don’t wish her ill, of course,” she says. “But I never liked her.”

Woman’s Hour—Abarchuk
It’s appropriate, then, that the next adaptation is that of Abarchuk, Lyuda’s ex-husband and father of Tolya. The piece takes the shape of Abarchuk writing (or reciting) a last testament to Tolya, who never took his name and didn’t follow his father’s fate; anyone who has listened in order thus far will know that Tolya is, in “real time,” already dead by this point, but it’s not a necessary component to listening to this short drama. I saw this play being recorded, and despite its brevity, it represents yet another important pole in the entirety of Life and Fate.

Malcolm Storry is great as Abarchuk, a true-blue (or red?) communist who, nevertheless, has ended up in a labor camp. He believes that his duty and his fate is to serve the Party in whatever capacity the Party thinks best; ergo, he is proud to be in the camp if his labor furthers the Party’s cause. Although he doesn’t believe he’s ever wavered from his Party line, he still believes the Party knows best. This attitude is amazing in retrospect, but he is absolutely committed to it. He and the other “politicals” are at odds with the criminals, people who have genuinely committed crimes, of which Barkhartov (Alun Raglan at his meanest!) is the worst. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, where Rubin’s single burst of courage (played with great heart by Peter Polycarpou) garners him a nail in the brain.

The arrival of Magar (Sean Baker), Abarchuk’s old teacher and his mentor in communism makes Abarchuk doubt when Magar tells him that all his sacrifices have been in vain, but Abarchuk stubbornly clings to what he’s always believed. In studio, the story ended with the sinister sound of a knife being drawn, but it appears the sound wasn’t convincing enough, so it just ends with Abarchuk acknowledging that someone has come into his room who doesn’t mean him well. It’s a lot crammed into a short drama and is foreshadowing for Krymov’s fall from grace.

Afternoon Play—Building 6/1 – Those Who Were Still Alive
Building 6/1 is a wonderful study in Grossman’s authorial lack of judgment. I remember being confused while reading the book; did I root for Grekov, the “manager” of Building 6/1, beloved by his men, lecherous toward Katya, courageous and full of a brand of socialism too extreme for the Stalinist regime? Or did I root for Seryozha, Lyuda’s older brother Dmitri’s son, who is likewise brave, intellectual, and compassionate? Or did I root for Krymov, so deeply beloved by Zhenya, who believed he was doing the right thing, uprooting the dangerous element of Grekov and his kind? You have to root for Katya, the radio operator, a wonderful character who comes into Building 6/1 naïve and helpless, then recovers her footing and falls in love with Seryozha.

Building 6/1 is a heroic band of soldiers fighting on a street in Stalingrad that has more or less been blown up by the enemy all around them. Despite their heroism, the rumors of their unconventional breakdown of military discipline have made the authorities wary enough to send in “Commissar” Krymov. David Tennant plays with his best voice of authority here, but with enough doubt to let us see how that authority is breaking down. He no longer has a role in the society he has fought hard to build and maintain. His reaction to what he thinks is Grekov deliberately trying to kill or wound him cements the fact that his world is spiralling out of control. Grekov (Joseph Millson) is played with similar ambiguity. Similarly, the text and the sound effects battle back and forth, wavering between complete chaos (which is difficult on radio) and an ordered sense of confusion, which regiments chaotic sound into digestible bytes for the brain and ear to understand.

I admit that characters like Viktorov, Seryozha and Tolya all sort of blend together. They are young, heroic, and in uniform. However, Seryozha is meant to be quite appealing, and Freddie Fox has a nice voice for that kind of role. The pleasant surprise performance, however, was Katie Angelou as Katya. What a wonderful voice, how expressive of exactly how I thought Katya would be from reading the book. Sometimes you hear a voice on radio so different and fresh, they really bring the character alive for you (which technically is what all the radio acting should do), which she certainly did. Even though I knew what events would befall Katya (the men reacting to her the way they did, her romance with Seryozha, what happens to the kitten she picks up) I still followed her story with avidity.

Woman’s Hour—Lieutenant Peter Bach
I know the production team of Life and Fate made some all-encompassing decisions from the start. These included pronunciation (“com-RAIIID” rather than “com-RADD”), patronymic-name consolidation, and as regards accents: no cod Russian accents, no cod German accents, and regional accents among the cast, who were from all areas of Britain (no standardization of this, ie, all Moscovites were not Northern, etc). The one place we hear a cod Russian accent is in Lieutenant Peter Bach, and in that instance it really stands out. I’m not sure how I feel about it. The voice is Jessica Raine’s and she is playing Zina, a Russian girl “collaborating” with the enemy. The enemy is Lieutenant Peter Bach, played by Geoffrey Streatfeild, and one of the characters that in the adaptations is difficult to feel empathy with. His treatment of Zina is sub-human. She has the cod Russian accent in order to illustrate how she sounds to Peter: there is a communication breakdown. Yet it makes the audience start to think of her in the way he does: ignorant and only useful up to a point. Grossman shows the front from both sides, in a way that I thought was quite balanced in the book. Bach is certainly an important character, but I felt much less empathy for him in this adaptation.

Afternoon Play—Novikov’s Story
I came out of reading the book much more in Novikov’s corner than in Krymov’s. The way Novikov’s loyalty to his men surmounts everything made me admire him; he doesn’t bow to superior pressure, which is of course what gets him in trouble (or is it Zhenya who does that?). Novikov is a very bright and courageous tankist, but his story illustrates what happens when someone innocent gets tarred with the brush of people who are not even guilty (as we will see, Krymov cannot be called guilty of being a Nazi spy, nor can Zhenya, whatever else they may have done). In that sense, it is quite a gripping story with a tragic ending, and once again, one of the essential poles in the Life and Fate story.

Getmanov and his family may seem like a footnote, but in the book as here, with Philip Jackson playing him, they are among the most real and human characters. As Alison Hindell described Getmanov, he’s an opportunist who will come out on top no matter which way the wind is blowing. Novikov’s love for Zhenya is quite simple, though Zhenya will later tell Nadya that they came from completely different backgrounds and didn’t even share any interests. Their liaisons in Kuibyshev have the same element of strangeness and impermanence that Bach and Zina’s relationship did.

Much was made of the authenticity of the tanks recorded and used as the background noise for the action. Since I am not a military buff it didn’t really matter to me. I remember being in the studio as the tank scenes were recorded, where imagination had to mostly supply the sense of volume and density that the tanks lend to the soundscape. The final product works quite well, as the tank scenes happen to be integral to Novikov’s character. The only part that was disappointing was the ending, which I felt was somewhat unclear, both as to what had happened between Zhenya and Novikov, and what role Getmanov had or hadn’t played in his downfall.

Woman’s Hour—Krymov- a Hero of the Revolution
If there is one play strand that perhaps could be done away with, I happen to believe it’s this one. Although it adds links between the chains of Krymov’s story—following on from both Novikov’s and Building 6/1—and Spiridonov, you have to be a real die-hard Krymov fan to believe it is essential to the drama for a new listener. If, for instance, you happened to tune in to Woman’s Hour for the first time randomly that day, you might be vaguely interested but probably quite confused! I’m not necessarily insisting that each Life and Fate drama could or should be enjoyed independently and in any order, and possibly that’s just not feasible.

Afternoon Play—Krymov in Moscow
I was in the studio when a few of the scenes from this drama (the Shtrum scenes) were recorded, but was not prepared for the completely different tone created by David Tennant’s performance. I knew from the book what Krymov was going to endure in the Lubyanka, but it garnered such weight, such absolute power, when I heard the performance. It’s often been said that you can close your eyes but you can’t close your ears—torture, distress, and pain come across much more sharply in aural form, in my opinion, than they do in any other form. I’m of course a fan of David Tennant, but I couldn’t think why exactly he’d been cast as Krymov, until he made the punishing and brutal gauntlet of 72 hours in the Lubyanka utterly harrowing and believable. My hat’s off to him—he was recording Life and Fate during the day while he was doing Much Ado About Nothing at night.

Krymov’s fellow internees have been streamlined from those in the book, but Ewan Bailey is utterly magnificent as Katsenelenbogen, who seems to have come straight out of Bulgakov. It’s a great twist of fate that Elliot Levey, who plays Don John to Tennant’s Benedick in Much Ado, plays the NKVD Interrogator. It’s a chilling performance; move over, John Sessions! Certainly that’s the parallel Grossman would have wanted made.

The life outside Krymov that is going on makes much more sense after having heard the final Classic Serial (a bit of a cheat chronologically, but it had to be done), despite some wonderful scenes between Viktor and Zhenya. (The chess scene is wonderfully done, despite the slipper-shuffling which I don’t think quite works on radio. Also the scene where Masha comes to dinner is superb on so many fronts, but especially when a flustered Viktor says, “Go to hell, Zhenya, just go to hell!”) The contrast between Zhenya—fiery, impetuous Zhenya—and her tribulations trying to get the package delivered to Krymov, despite being very much his ex-wife, and his within the prison come to a wonderfully illustrative head in the final scene.

Saturday Play—Fortress Stalingrad
In Fortress Stalingrad, they roll the big guns out—quite literally. It’s an interesting experience, being served up the entire battle in a way that differs from the book, which of course tells it in a less narrative fashion. It’s a big subject, with lots of characters. The beauty is that if you hadn’t heard any of Life and Fate yet, you could still more or less figure out what’s going on. You don’t particularly need to know about Peter Bach, Vera, Spiridonov, or Zina (whose paths eventually cross in a wonderfully unexpected way) previously to appreciate what happens to them here.

I like the larger framework pulling out of Peter Bach and including Paulus and Adam; this lends the German experience a bit more humanity and verisimilitude than what we just heard in Lieutenant Peter Bach. Necessarily this play deals more with the hard reality of battle and as such contains battle scenes. Jonathan Myerson said at the BBC/Cambridge event that he tells students never to write battle scenes for radio, and I can see why he says this: it’s can be very difficult to pick out the relevant information at the correct speed, so it’s either going to lag behind slightly or becoming confusing. I did get a bit confused; this play more than any of the others requires total and devoted, invested attention.

I also felt slightly like the climax included a denouement that was a bit too long. The fate of poor alcoholic Spiridonov for abandoning his post suggests a whole new story, which perhaps Grossman had even plotted out in his head. Kenneth Cranham was very strong as Spiridonov (and when reading Grossman’s letter and the reply, too, at the BBC event!).

I haven’t heard all of Viktor and the Academy yet, so when I do you’ll get that review as well as my general comments.