Russian National Mail

“Ekaterinburg used to be famous as the death-place of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Now, however, it seems to be the chief birthplace of new Russian drama. After Vassily Sigarev and the Presynakov brothers, all championed by the Royal Court, along comes Oleg Bogaev: a strange, eccentric, Gogolian talent here given his British premiere by a new group called Sputnik Theatre.

Bogaev's hero is an ex-soldier and civil servant who now lives in wretched poverty in a room piled high with yellowing papers. His sole means of relieving his frustration is letter-writing. However, since his correspondents include Lenin, Elizabeth II, Vivien Leigh and Yuri Gagarin, it soon becomes clear that he is engaged in a frantic dialogue with himself. In the wilder stretches of his imagination, his correspondents even talk to each other, so that the Bolshevik leader and the British monarch argue ferociously over the rights to his seedy apartment. The moral seems clear: life in modern Russia is conducive to madness. Although Bogaev's play is a piece of contemporary absurdism, it also belongs to a long Russian literary tradition. If Gogol comes to mind, it is because he was both an expert on crazed solitude and an uncontrollable letter-writer: he once wrote to a hated critic, after the death of his wife: "Jesus Christ will help you become a gentleman - which you are neither by education or inclination."

What Bogaev's play offers is a haunting image of desolation, one that almost seems a metaphor for artistic creation: what else does a writer do but give life to absent figures through imaginary conversations? As director and translator, Noah Birksted-Breen makes a profoundly Russian play accessible to a western audience. Kevin McMonagle as the hero suggests both the sadness and the occasional ecstasy of the epistolary life... An intriguing hour-long curiosity.”
The Guardian

“The Russian Revolution is alive and kicking and taking place in a pub theatre in Islington, north London. Russian National Mail, by Oleg Bogaev, is the flagship production of the Sputnik Theatre Company, which aims to bring new Russian writing to the British stage. Their opening production focuses on Bogaev, part of the new wave of Ekaterinburg-based playwrights who emerged after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

Russian National Mail, winner of a prestigious Golden Mask award in Russia, is an epistolary play with a difference. Our hero is Ivan Sidorovich, a destitute widower who fills his days by writing letters, first to dead friends and then, increasingly, to an astonishing array of people he has never met, from Queen Elizabeth II and Vivien Leigh to Lenin and Yuri Gagarin.

As Ivan stumbles towards delirium and death, writing and reading letters of which he is both writer and recipient, the audience is plunged into his fantasy correspondence as these figures appear in Ivan's home. In a typically Soviet detail, they have descended on Ivan to squabble over who will inherit his squalid lodgings.

Kevin McMonagle gives a convincing, tragicomic performance as Ivan. His downfall is attributed to the death of his wife, portrayed in the affecting opening scenes by a strikingly life-like puppet whose wooden-spoon arms and brown- paper body recall both her domestic duties and her professional role as a post-office worker.

In contrast, the supporting cast of characters are given little space to develop beyond caricature, although they attack their rather one-dimensional roles with zeal.

Just as Ivan wanders around his flat, plucking letters from inside drawers and off the floor, Bogaev, too, plunders the rich seam of great Russian literature. His play touches upon the eternal themes of the motherland's burdensome historical legacy, the post-Soviet obsession with accommodation, the small man's futile struggle against bureaucracy and, of course, madness - a mainstay of Russian writers, from Pushkin's delusional Evgeny in The Bronze Horseman to Gogol's countless anti-heroes.

Noah Birksted-Breen, the translator and director, retains this very Russian spirit while at the same time rendering the piece accessible to a British audience with his fresh, unstilted translation. All in all, a successful launch for Sputnik.” The Independent

In Travesties, Tom Stoppard brings together Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara to debate political history. For this hour-long absurdist drama, the Urals writer Oleg Bogaev performs a comparable trick.

In the squalid flat he shared with his postal-worker wife until her death, Ivan, a pensioner stricken by poverty and isolation, writes a stream of letters. Some are to old friends who have long ago forgotten him; but most are to people he has never met: Queen Elizabeth II, Vivien Leigh, Lenin, Trotsky, Gagarin, even some amiable Martians. His scrawled epistles never make it out of his paper-strewn home - and yet, mysteriously, replies materialise, tucked in his dressing gown pocket or poking out of a drawer. And when he sleeps, his correspondents themselves appear, gathering around his rumpled bed - not out of concern for Ivan's welfare, but to squabble over which of them gets to keep his apartment when he dies.

Bogaev shares a mentor with the playwrights Vassily Sigarev and the Presnyakov brothers, and if Russian National Mail is less successful than their output, it shares their bleak, blackly humorous view of post-Soviet life. Ivan is filled with impotent fury at the pitifully inadequate pension on which he, a war veteran, is expected to live; and a scene in which Elizabeth II and Lenin argue over him, the former denigrating him as "a potato in a suit" and the latter claiming him as a casualty of capitalism, underlines the way in which individuals are pawns in the game of politics. The scramble for ownership of Ivan's meagre possessions is a grim irony and a grotesque insult to a comrade whose suffering was a brick in the building of the now- crumbled Communist state.

Birksted-Breen's translation nicely balances bitterness and wit, and Kevin McMonagle is an appealing and affecting Ivan.” The Times Reviewer: Sam Marlowe