From Russia with surtitles

In the west, the 1960s are a well-known cultural trademark, evoking The Beatles, Woodstock and the Vietnam war. Another version of the sixties went generally un-recorded, launching names such as the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the singer Bulat Okudzhava and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. These were the shestidesyatniki or “people of the sixties” in the USSR.

Otherwise known as the ottepel or “thaw”, the rather less groovy Soviet version of the 1960s actually started in 1956, following the 20th Communist Party Congress when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced the evils of his predecessor Joseph Stalin.

The decade begat a flowering of art, poetry, film and theatre. One of the most successful brands to emerge was Moscow’s Sovremennik (“Contemporary”) Theatre, which recorded its first production in an attic studio in 1956.

Today, one of the three founders of that theatre, 77-year-old Galina Volchek, is still Sovremennik’s creative director, a chain-smoking force of nature and grande dame of the Moscow theatre world.

In January, Volchek and the Sovremennik, on their 10-day tour, will be the first Russian-language theatre to perform in London’s West End since the fall of communism, performing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, as well as Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind.

While other Russian theatres, the Marinsky opera and the Bolshoi ballet have performed on world tours, drama is one of those performing arts that so far has fallen between stools. Volchek worries that it will be hard to get the English public interested in watching a play in Russian with surtitles. And there are other challenges: three sets to put up and take down in a week in an unfamiliar theatre – a logistical nightmare. However, money isn’t a problem – in Russia, there is usually a billionaire or two around for just such things, and the Sovremennik’s sponsor is Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich.

Picking the repertoire for the London show was not easy, Volchek says. First to mind came Whirlwind, about Ginzburg’s years as a gulag prisoner under Stalin. It was the first play put on by the theatre in 1989 after the easing of censorship under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost.

“Why should London not see such a fearsome page in our country’s history? Without this play, it would not a be a full picture of Sovremennik.”

The two Chekhov plays, brilliantly acted, decorated and costumed with understated elegance, were chosen for their timelessness. “Everyone always finds something for themselves in these plays, something to suit the time or the place. In the 1970s when we put on The Cherry Orchard, it was a different Lopakhin” (referring to the character who convinces Madame Ranyevskaya to sacrifice her titular cherry orchard). “Today, there are new Lopakhins,” she says ominously, and takes a long drag on a cigarette.

But challenges are nothing new to Volchek, who regularly went head-to-head with the Communist party in an effort to push the boundaries of what was artistically permissible. In 1967 she helped stage the play Bolshevik on the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution; it featured a discussion by Lenin and his circle of the decision to start the “Red Terror” of 1918, which the party wanted to shut down for the odd reason that the play was guilty of “disclosing state secrets”.

Only a last-minute intervention by the then Soviet culture minister Ekaterina Furtseva (in response to a desperate message written in lipstick and shoved under her door by Volchek) saved the play from being banned.

In the months before the 20th Party Congress in 1956, they launched themselves as an offshoot of the Moscow Art Theatre School, the premier drama school of Soviet times, which had atrophied under Stalin. “They say youth is vengeance, and we were youth,” Volchek giggles. The Young Artists’ Theatre launched a revolution against the dominant Stalinist aesthetic with a a play called Forever Alive, a love story set in the second world war. The hero and heroine, weak and in love, mistake-prone and complaining, were not the standard fare of Soviet war propaganda. Stalin’s brand of culture had reduced actors to playing statues – genuine humour was purged as “sentimentality”.

But the public hungered for something else, and the Sovremennik gave it to them. It was the same longing for love, family, and private feelings amid the bombastic public culture of the Soviet era that in earlier decades had fuelled the underground popularity of poet Anna Akhmatova.

The Sovremennik delivered art that spoke to feelings and frailties, the diametric opposite of the Soviet ubermensch.

“We wanted to show the heroes as people: people who got lost, people who made mistakes, people who were weak,” Volchek says. “It was as if we were presenting a sort of a different truth.”

Official critics in those days pounced on it as “whispering realism”.

In 1960 the Sovremennik got its first theatre, a building “which was only fit to be torn down” on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square, which began three decades of turmoil in the Soviet art world.

The Soviet 1960s were a heady time, and spawned some of the best art of the seven-decade Soviet period – Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the film Andrei Rubliev, actor Vladimir Vysotky’s portrayal of Hamlet wearing jeans and a black turtleneck in Moscow’s Taganka Theatre.

The Sovremennik spanned the entire cultural history of the post-Stalin years, which forced many artists into compromises with officialdom. “We never lied,” says Volchek. “We may not have told the whole truth, because of the censorship. But we never lied.”

The end of the fight came for Volchek in 1989. She remembers one day, amid the reforms of glasnost and perestroika, waiting to begin a rehearsal for a new play. “I suddenly realised I was waiting for the [censorship] commission to show up. They didn’t come,” she says. They launched the play Into the Whirlwind. “Suddenly there was an open window, and we jumped right through it,” she says.

But the end of communism ushered in a new era with new problems – above all, funding. With deep-pocketed oligarchs such as Abramovich being a fan of the theatre, the Sovremennik has circumvented a problem that has crippled other theatres.

And during the Putin era, an ill-defined patriotism has replaced communism as something akin to an official ideology.

The freedom of expression that flowered after the fall of communism has been progressively tightened. “It was like, for 70 years this train was going in one direction. Then they try to turn it in the opposite direction in a single moment. Of course this is impossible.”

So far, this has not affected the theatre, says Volchek, who counts Vladimir Putin as one of the theatre’s aficionados. “We have not felt any pressure, thank God.” And she knocks on the table a few times for luck.

The Sovremennik Theatre company performs at the Noel Coward Theatre, London, January 21-29 www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk