The Grain Store (RSC)

The second cab off the rank for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Revolutions project is a commission from Ukrainian playwright Natal'ia Vorozhbit, tracing the repercussions of Stalin’s drive towards collectivised farming upon the inhabitants of a rural village in the Ukraine and, by implication, upon the subsequent fortunes of the entire Soviet Union, right up to the present day.

The audience arrives to the somewhat forced spectacle of seeing other audience members seated at long trestle tables onstage, eating beetroot soup, dumplings and watermelon with some of the performers, while folksy Ukrainian music is played from the side of stage and a couple of the actors sing along. It unwittingly sets a tone for what is to come, as these privileged guests file back to their seats with the faintly self-satisfied look of those who have revelled in feasting while those around them are constrained to sit and watch.

Vorozhbit sets her story in a community already riven with tensions between the kulak farming families and their impoverished neighbours, tensions which the pressures of Stalin’s Five Year Plan ignite like a brushfire. The pauper Arsei Pechoritsa (Tunji Kasim) is appointed as a Soviet educator and rises rapidly through the ranks under the harsh tutelage of Mortko (John Mackay on fine chilling form) who is shipped in from Moscow to enforce the new regime. The church is requisitioned and turned into the titular grain store, in which the harvest is continually deposited but from which food never seems to be distributed. Dissenters are shot and starvation slowly begins to decimate the remaining villagers.

The play sits in the long shadow of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and the comparison finds Vorozhbit’s play wanting, as it never quite touches the heart or plumbs the tragic depths of Steinbeck’s Depression-era depression. Admittedly, some of the specifics of Michael Boyd’s production must be held accountable for this failure. The uneven casting amongst some members of the ensemble makes it hard to empathise or engage with some of the play’s most important plot strands.

This fact is reinforced by the recent absorption of Kathryn Hunter into the ensemble, who brings a sense of physical vitality and immersion into her characters which will hopefully invigorate those around her. For all this, The Grain Store is a perfectly serviceable piece which goes some way to giving a voice to those who suffered unspeakably in the name of Stalin’s progressive policies, but an even vaguely competent adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm would probably have made the point much more movingly and much more powerfully.

- Philip Holyman