A Russian in the Woods by Peter Whelan
Directed by Lisa Thomas
Performances: Tuesday 1st - Saturday 5th July 2008, Bell Theatre
In Berlin, in 1949, a young English sergeant, Pat Harford is assigned to guard an army outpost for a weekend. Everything about the place is unsettling: the personnel are not what they seem; dead soldiers are buried in the garden.
Pat, an idealistic second-generation socialist with a taste for Russian literature is immediately enmeshed in the cross-currents of personal and power relationships around the office. It appears at first to be a fairly everyday tangle, but when in a spirit of friendship Pat invites back an American soldier one night, he is flung into a swamp of machinations and counter-machinations involving both the regular Army and British and Russian military spies. The more Pat struggles the deeper he sinks and the codes of decency he has imbibed through his youth are shown to be held in contempt by the very classes that he supposed revered them most.
The play concerns itself with the universal political climate engendered by that the Cold War – a world in which duplicity and lies became the order of the day, and in which such political strategies inevitably came to infect personal interactions as well.
This tense, semi-autobiographical play is one of Peter Whelan (The Herbal Bed, The Accrington Pals) most personal and effective. Constantly surprising, it offers excellent roles for a range of actors.
Cast
Clive Burns - Matt Davies
Pat Harford - Adam Crook
Sergeant Dilke - Neil Carmichael
Geoff Wirral - Derek Dempsey
Ilse Bucher - Liv Fewster
Fraser Cullen - Simon Roberts
Dieter Stahl - Neil Carmichael
Lloyd Jackson - Brendan Murphy
For more details, please contact Lisa Thomas, Director
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