Enemies

Synopsis

Set on a family estate in provincial Russia in 1907, Gorky's powerful drama focuses on a struggle between workers and industrialists. Caught in the middle, the well intentioned liberal - minded owner's brother is slain in a scuffle with a workman. The ensuing investigation uncovers a political fervour that sweeps the countryside.

Our Review:

12 May 2006

One of the great achievements in the early history of the Royal Shakespeare Company was its introduction of the plays of Maxim Gorky, starting with Enemies at the Aldwych in 1971. Michael Attenborough’s revival at the Almeida, in a new version by David Hare, reveals a play of panoramic vision and remarkable detail.

Never has the Almeida seen such a squash at its curtain calls, as two dozen actors shuffle to their places in the line-up. They have all been sharply characterised as landed gentry, factory owners, languorous intellectuals, militant workers, soldiers and servants. As the critic Ronald Bryden said at the time of the RSC production, the 1906 play is “the missing link between Chekhov and the Russian Revolution…Gorky’s The Lower Depths may be the greater play, but Enemies was surely his most necessary one”.

Zakhar Bardin (Sean Chapman) is the troubled factory owner in an unnamed part of Russia where the impact of a strike sets off a serie...

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Latest User Review

194.75.129.200) - 22 June 2006:

The Almeida auditorium was already refreshingly cool on an afternoon when the outside temperature was in the high twenties centigrade, but its ambience was made even more pleasant by the set used at the start of Enemies (by Maxim Gorky, as adapted by David Hare). Lime trees clustered at the back of the stage, a table (bearing a samovar, tea glasses and various other culinary items on a white cloth) and a wooden garden seat stood on a lawn, and birdsong could be heard. Before the play began, however, this serene atmosphere was broken, first by the hooting of a siren, then by the remorseless thumping of machinery, both so loud as to suggest that a factory lurked just beyond the trees. This contrast between the noise and the peaceful scene before us, together with the ominous music that began to play, symbolised to a large extent the story of Enemies which is, in part, about the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the workers in pre-Revolutionary Russia. But the play (which has the distinction of having been censored by both the pre- and post-Revolutionary governments) is also about the discord that existed within the bourgeoisie itself, here made apparent not only by the diverse attitudes to the workers taken by the two factory owners – the one a liberal whose principal concern is the land he also owns, the other the hard-line managing director, who is from the professional classes and who also has a stake in the business – but also by the conflicting opinions in the former's own family, some of whom think he is too lenient, others that he is not enlightened enough. A disagreement between the two owners over the dismissal of a violent foreman and the subsequent shooting of the managing director are the events which lead to the brutal exposure of these various class divisions, and which leave the liberal owner facing a situation in which his family is divided against itself and his house has been transformed into a kangaroo court. There are strong performances throughout, particularly from Sean Chapman as the well-meaning but weak landowner and Sean Gilder, as both the hard-line managing director and the army captain in charge of the kangaroo court. Stephen Noonan makes a chilling Public Prosecutor, all the more vehement because he is the managing director's brother, whilst Jack Davenport, who plays the landowner's dissolute and idle sibling, conveys the character's feelings of uselessness and lack of self-worth and his apparently drink-enhanced inability to improve himself superbly but still makes us sympathise with him, for we feel there is a better person inside him trying to get out. This is a fine production of a powerful play which might seem rooted in its own time but which also has messages about the various divisions in modern society. And its occasional humorous references to the rise of "socialism", a phenomenon which is regarded with horror by some of the characters, carry an extra level of irony in today's Britain! ...

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