Opus 7

Northern Stage, Newcastle

by Mike Quille

Opus 7 is an all-embracing, multi-media performance of breathtaking power and imagination. Genuinely original theatre by the Dmitry Krymov Lab company, it’s a spectacular fusion of genres if not a new genre in itself. 

As an example of contemporary Russian physical theatre it combines dance, music, painting, circus, film, puppetry, song and special effects in a double bill which deals with the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust and the more ambiguous story of the Soviet treatment of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and other artists.

In the first piece, the horror of the Holocaust is evoked by film of a jackbooted Gestapo officer kicking a pram which then physically erupts through a wall onto the stage, crashing into piles of victims’ spectacles.

A pair of red children’s shoes is slowly and movingly walked across the stage, while paint is splashed against the walls, forming images of Jewish children and Hassidic men and old photographs illustrate a stream of random, spoken snippets of information about individual Jews.

Suddenly the walls of the set collapse and thousands of bits of paper, the lost lives of European and Russian Jewry, are blown into the auditorium.

In the second piece, Soviet “proletarians” played by the stage hands construct a piano from which Shostakovich emerges. A 15 foot-high puppet representing Mother Russia but also sporting a commissar’s cap appears on stage. At first it  nurtures the composer but then chases him round the stage, taking pot-shots at him and other Soviet artists and victims of the purges and ends by smothering the life out of him.

Striking visual images express the conflicted relationship between state and artists in the Soviet Union. Flowers in their buttonholes look like gunshot wounds and the pin on the medal honouring Shostakovich runs through the his chest. The clash of art and politics becomes a loud and frightening dodgem ride of grand pianos as they crash into each other, with the composer’s symphonies playing in the background.

It’s surreal, imagistic and wordless, with an emotionally charged, dreamlike logic which at times descends into nightmare. The fast-moving and visually stunning tableaux are by turns comedic and sinister, tender and violent.

Opus 7 has just finished its British tour but next time Krymov’s company comes to here, go and see whatever they do — you will not have seen anything like it before.