Burnt by the Sun

Synopsis

Colonel Kotov, decorated hero of the Russian Revolution, is spending an idyllic summer in the country with his beloved young wife and family. But on one glorious sunny morning in 1936, his wife’s former lover returns from a long and unexplained absence. Amidst a tangle of sexual jealousy, retribution and remorseless political backstabbing, Kotov feels the full, horrifying reach of Stalin’s rule. I’ll give you one chance. Go now and type your confession. I take you and the confession to Moscow tonight - two big feathers in my cap - and maybe, maybe.. they’ll spare Maroussia... as the wife of a traitor. We all have a choice, Comrade. Poised at the beginning of Stalin’s Great Terror, Burnt by the Sun shows a brutal future encroaching on the last days of a fading world.

Our Review:

4 March 2009

Playwright Peter Flannery must have watched the outstanding 1994 Oscar-winning Russian movie Burnt by the Sun and noted how the action covers one day, how many of the scenes have a theatrical quality of dialogue as in a Chekhov or Gorky play, and how the central love story is consumed in the march of history.

Although best known for such television work as Our Friends in the North (derived from a stage play with the RSC), Blind Justice and The Devil’s Whore, Flannery’s earlier stage plays Savage Amusement(1978) and Singer(1989), both for the RSC, and the first new plays respectively in the Pit and the Swan, deliberately painted personal relationships on a wider political canvas.

Burnt by the Sun therefore proves a perfect project, stunningly realised not only in the adroitness and fidelity of the textual adaptation, but also in Howard Davies’s perfectly cast pr...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 21 May 2009:

Howard Davies follows the brilliant Gethsemane with the equally enthralling Burnt By the Sun which superbly conveys the effects of Stalin's evil paranoia. The first half is unmistakably Chekhovian as a White Russian family cling to relics of their pre-revolutionary lifestyle, barely tolerated by Ciaran Hinds' brusque Bolshevik general. His young wife (a luminous Michelle Dockery) is stunned when a former lover returns after an unexplained absence. Rory Kinnear adds tap dancing to his extraordinary range of skills and produces another almost perfect performance as Mitia. The second half brings home the awful truth of Stalin's purges of old comrades as Mitia takes advantage of his secret role to exact a terrible revenge on the general who had deprived him of the love of Maroussia. I did feel that Kinnear didn't quite fully capture the chilling power of his hold over Kotov but this is a small quibble over a brilliantly acted and staged production, an apt successor to August: Osage County which fully graced the Lyttelton stage....

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