Post by @federicabalbi

Seen at Omnibus Theatre in London on the 8^th of February 2025

4 stars – clever, minimalistic drama

Alya stays silent about her son Vanya: Vanya has been sent to the peace. Until one day Alya receives a message from her son’s number, reading: ‘Vanya has not been captured. He is absolutely free’.

Set in Russia and created in 2022 by artists in exile for their political opinions, this play portrays the despair of a woman in an authoritarian regime. In the beginning, the actor Nikolay Mulakov introduces various nameless characters, all played by himself. This light-hearted moment is in contrast with the core of the show, where through faint interactions the tormented Alya desperately tries to talk about her son. Neither the Neighbour nor the Woman-who-is-not-begging want to hear about him, nor see his videos on Alya’s phone.

Natalia Lizorkina’s text is touching and rich with images. Language takes a turn, similarly to Orwell’s doublethink, because in the dictatorship a mother cannot talk about her son, about the war and the death he’s condemned to. In order to be able to speak, Alya says the opposite of what she means, and both meanings briefly coexist, until the spectators choose what to believe. Along the show, one gets familiar with these mental gymnastics, through an ongoing questioning on what is the truth – a scary mechanism that requires everyone’s criticism to always be alert. [Some questions I can’t help but ask myself: What happens if it isn’t always alert? What are the lies we accept as true for not being used to having to weigh such ambivalence all the time?]

Vanya is Alive does not take sides concerning the current war, but it is essentially a pacifist play. It depicts the feeling of living under an authoritarian regime, where speech is not free and death in jail is a very tangible scenario as a consequence of crimes against the state, while the laws by which these ‘crimes’ are enforced are violations of human rights.

Dressed in a hoodie and jeans, brilliant Nikolay Mulakov delivers the text with great sensibility, shifting from character to character in a subtle way in the beginning, in a more connotated one by the end. Director Ivanka Polchenko, also the founder of the company L’Oeil épissé sur âme pure (OESAP), enriches the text with visual references of war pictures, reported on stage as evocative freezes that condense emotion and mark passages throughout the text, together with some other modest but very impactful devices.

Current run: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/vanya-is-alive/

Company Website: https://vanyaisalive.live/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanya_is_alive