Belvoir Downstairs, September 23, 2004
Lenny Ann Low, Sydney Morning Herald
Black Milk begins with great promise. Starting in the Belvoir foyer, with a violin-playing musician (Paul Marciniak) and a (faux) fur-coated, husky-toned narrator intimately guiding the audience inside, the mood suggests we are entering the pages of an obscure and bleakly seductive fairytale.
That feeling continues upon reaching the stage and seeing Genevieve Dugard's evocative set and Matt Cox's brooding lighting state.
We are in Russia, the time is now and there is a man snoring underneath a row of orange railway station seats on stage.
After the narrator (Boris Brkic) leaves, two unlikely characters arrive to wait for a train on this remote, rural railway platform. Lyovchik (Sam Haft), a hot-tempered spiv, and his wife, Poppet (Melanie Holt), a whingeing, heavily pregnant pain, are on their way home to Moscow after hawking faulty Malaysian toasters to the few locals.
Trains are scarce in this backwater and the squabbling pair spew forth their agitation and distaste like effluent from a drain.
As a portrait of a bleakly crumbling post-communist Russia, Black Milk's text does get its point across literally, poetically and symbolically. Vassily Sigarev's words and characters illustrate a population deprived of identity and strength in a modern world measuring superficial self-worth.
After interval, we find the couple still on the platform 10 days later.
Poppet has had her baby with the help of a caring local, and she glimpses an escape from her vitriolic cheapjack life in Moscow by staying in this backward spot in the country.
Elaine Hudson shines here as the warm-hearted midwife fussing over Poppet and her baby while also providing great grist to Lyovchik's consternation at losing his influence over his wife.
Russian playwright Sigarev has made a big mark on the theatre scene in London, winning the London Evening Standard award for most promising playwright and receiving critical acclaim for this and other works, Plasticine and Ladybird.
BLACK MILK
Downstairs Theatre, Belvoir St
Colin Rose, The Sun-Herald
September 26, 2004
Not yet 30, Vassily Sigarev is better known in the UK - where he was discovered by the Royal Court Theatre and is an award-winning playwright - than he is in his native Russia.
Black Milk, translated with a rough-diamond London ear by Sasha Dugdale, is the second of his plays to be produced at the Royal Court, opening there last year.
What price perestroika? Lyovchik (Sam Haft) and Poppet (Melanie Holt), who's eight months pregnant, are a cynical and bickering pair of young Muscovites. They have a scam flogging useless toasters to a gullible peasantry. On this particular day, they're stranded at a provincial train station and besieged by a posse of locals demanding refunds.
To Lyovchik and Poppet, these people are just despicable mugs. But when Poppet goes into labour prematurely, the dirt-poor proles respond with generous compassion. Poppet's cynicism is shaken, but Lyovchik reaffirms his view of the world by behaving even more cruelly.
Does a free-market economy mean that everyone is free to screw over one another? As well as offering a snapshot of the troubles and contradictions of contemporary Russia, Black Milk slyly suggests that something intangible might have been lost - a degree of common decency, perhaps, or a sense of unity - in the wholesale shift from Soviet-style socialism to a more capitalist outlook.
It's a fascinating play. Sarah Woods is a standout as the worldly ticket clerk.
From Russia with toasters
Sydney Morning Herald, September 17, 2004
Guns, vodka, dodgy appliances ... the modern perils are revealed in a play by its bad boy of theatre, reports Alexa Moses.
Russian playwright Vassily Sigarev is a bright young thing in the world of European theatre. British playwright Tom Stoppard compared Sigarev with Dostoevsky when presenting him with London's Evening Standard Award in 2002.
However, last year London's Guardian newspaper said the 27-year-old disappears on vodka binges and is better known in his homeland as an "inveterate lush" than a playwright.
Sigarev is near impossible to track down for an interview. Yet two small theatre groups scored the rights to the Australian debut of his play Black Milk, which was performed at London's Royal Court Theatre last year.
"It's got trains, guns, vodka, toasters - all the things you'd expect in a Russian play," says director Sarah Goodes.
"It's like a western in terms of directing. They're stuck in this small place and people come through the saloon doors challenging them. It has great meaty characters. Sigarev is dealing with archetypes. There's the drunk gun-wielding character that has run off the pages of a Chekhov novel and into this play."
Goodes was surprised that independent theatre companies Wildcard Productions and Splinter Theatre were allowed to put on Black Milk.
"Every year Company B at Belvoir Street theatre have play readings," Goodes says.
"Last year I went to a few of them and they did Black Milk because they were considering it for [the upstairs theatre]. I loved it.
"You assume one of the big companies will do it, and then a girl called Melanie Holt called me. She has a small company called Wildcard Productions. She asked me if I wanted to direct it.
"I didn't think she'd have the rights for it, but she did, and none of the big companies jumped at it. I don't know why."
Black Milk is about Moscow couple Lyovchik and Poppet. They sell Malaysian toasters that don't work for quadruple the normal price to rural Russian villagers, who then bail up the couple when they realise the toasters are defective.
The smoking, wild Poppet is heavily pregnant, and most of the action takes place on a train platform while the couple waits for the train back to Moscow to arrive.
This play wouldn't have received critical acclaim if it didn't work on more levels. It's about how old Russia meets new Russia after the fall of communism and the rise of capitalism, as well as a study of modern marriage where insult and endearment mingle.
To direct the play, the 32-year-old Goodes has studied up on Russia, including ABC correspondent Monica Attard's Russia: Which Way Paradise? The cast is likewise reading about the country.
The production also has narrator Boris Brkic, whose family and first language are Russian, and Russian theatre director Joseph Uchitel as adviser. Uchitel says Sigarev's rendering of modern Russia is apt, but he points out that the script is not a photograph or documentary but a playwright's vision.
"I think what one has to keep in mind is that people lived under total control by the government for more than 70 years," says Uchitel, who recently directed Empress of China at the Belvoir Downstairs.
"From 1917, people were ruled by the government and they didn't have any property, so stealing from places of work owned by the government wasn't considered a big deal.
"When the whole thing collapsed, they didn't know and I still think they don't know how to deal with the situation of free enterprise, capitalism and freedom in the society. It will take a couple of generations for them to learn."
Goodes, who likens the rehearsal process to "walking through the dark woods", turning the words on the page into a living production, is completely absorbed in the task. This is the part of her work she loves best.
"Theatre's so collaborative and you wrestle with it," she says.
"You wrestle with the moment because that's what you have to re-create night after night after night.
"You only need to get it once with film. Theatre is more of a living, breathing thing while film, when it's captured, it's behind glass."
