Last tango in London
Deadly dance at the National
Everything begins in a Chekhov-like atmosphere. Everything is there, the music, the nostalgia, something in the air like a fleeting memory of times that won’t never come back… The set is the house of a deprived aristocrat family who owe their very surviving to the protection of General Kotov, “faithful disciple and brother-in-arms of Comrade Stalin, renowned Bolshevick, decorated many times” whom they secretly despise, for he is, according to his own words, nothing but “a semi-literate Bolshevik“, “an ignorant peasant“. The family is reunited for the holidays, and against a background of brass-band and young Pioneers parade, Kotov will see his whole life devastated in a few hours, all that he believed in destroyed by an intruder coming from the past.
The plot could be summed as follows: in 1936, whereas Serguei Petrovitch Kotov, a Red Army hero, rests on his laurels in his datcha with the woman he loves “with every bone of his body“, his daughter and the family, Mitia pops up, a man of talent, who plays the piano, dances and sings pretty well, attractive, fascinating and disturbingly genial… He likes Puccini, Shakespeare and the tap-dance, he is the genuine offspring of the decadent world Kotov hates so much; he has been Maroussia’s lover twelve years ago, he has everything for him, the effulgence of his youth, his energy, his talents and one assumes he has come back to revive his past love.
But it’s only a pretext, for Mitia has an agenda: he has come to destroy Kotov, the embarrassing hero. The Soviet Revolution is starting to devour its own children, and the regime asks for scapegoats, like Kotov, a kind of idealist innocent.
I won’t dwell upon the political aspects of the play, they have been discussed already in connection with Serguei Mikhalkov’s movie. What has touched me in Peter Flannery’s adaptation is the deep personal issues that are at stake between the three protagonists, the two rivals locked in their deadly dance around Maroussia, who Kotov loves sincerely and whom Mitia manipulates shamelessly. Mitia belongs to the rising generation, he is the armed wing of the terror regime that is setting in and above all, he is a traitor. Serguei Petrovitch is a dinosaur, but one can like him for his sincerity, and his clear-sighted assessment of the price to pay for his choices.
Each of them has his moment of glory: Mitia delights us with his shticks – playing Offenbach with a gas mask on his face is not that easy – , his performance as a tap-dancer, his (apparently) charming behaviour, and we feel almost sorry for him when he tells the tale of his lost love. Kotov moves us with the strength of his faith (because we know that history will turn all his hopes down) and his candid love for his wife. Whereas the outcome is in sight, the two men perform a kind of mating dance before Maroussia. Eventually Kotov wins (Ciarán you’ve not forgotten your fourteen years in Patricia Mulholland’s company! ). Maroussia is his again, the scales have fallen from her eyes but he knows that everything is over. Even for Mitia: “You lost the war. You lost the good life. You lost Maroussia. You became a sad man.“
Would anybody have read our first review? In this performance, parts are more fairly distributed, Ciarán seems more at ease with his character, he is more visible and the love dance contest which he emerges from as the unmistakable winner, launches once more, a spontaneous applause from the audience.
Ciarán, you made my day!
Rehearsals have begun in January at the Lyttleton Theatre and the first pictures are already available on the