Edward's Theatre Company
The Suicide
Edward’s Theatre Company aims to produce a wide variety of work and to present it to as broad an audience as possible. The company returns, for this its tenth year at the Fringe, after last year’s sell-out hit –Orwell’s 1984 – and the recent highly acclaimed revue Love is …?
In Nikolai Erdman’s darkly comic cure for political headaches – The Suicide – Semyon, unemployed and depressed, considers suicide only to find himself besieged by people begging him to die for their cause. They promise fame and a celebrated death; but can he go through with it?
Performances:
6th to 11th August
Price:
£6.00 (£4.00) »
Russian tragi-comedy
Edward’s Theatre Company returns for its 10th year on the Fringe, its 9th at Venue 40, with not one, but two productions. Following from last year’s powerful, sell-out 1984, expectations and the standard against which their work will be judged are necessarily high.
Their second production (their first, Sondheim’s Marry me a Little, is reviews separately), Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, in a translation from Russian by Richard Nelson, tells the story of anti-hero Semyon Podsekalnikov who, finding himself recently unemployed, leaving his wife the sole breadwinner, and browbeaten by his mother-in-law, contemplates suicide. The title and subject notwithstanding, this is a comedy, albeit a black one, as various suitors vie for Podsekalnikov to die for them, or more often their cause. As the Russian liberal bemoans, those who have ideas no longer wish to die and those who wish to die have no ideas.
A promising concept then, but one which doesn’t entirely succeed. In part this owes more to the work which, while certainly engaging and often amusing, is never quite hilarious. It seems at times to fall uncomfortably between out and out humour and what is actually quite a poignant situation. This is not helped by the fact that the script could have been more tightly edited.
In a very Russian way, there is strong philosophical undercurrent – as when Podsekalnikov debates the tick-tock transition of what will be the final second of his life or when the priest responds to a question about life after death by asking if he wants the truth according to scripture, science or conscience. But Erdman is no Tolstoy and these points have been made more profoundly elsewhere.
The script does contain some brilliant flashes: Podsekalnikov’s attempts to restore purpose to his life by learning the euphonium and the twenty step guide to mastering it,
It was certainly entertaining and some strong performances shine through.
Tam Pollard