Anyone who has known an old married couple will recognise this
The March on Russia Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
Mikhail Gorbachev was in London making a state visit, jamming up the traffic, when David Storey’s The March on Russia opened at the National in April 1989. The talk was of glasnost, not yet of the collapse of Communism.
Yet something was in the air, and Storey, a subtle and sensitive (rather undersung) writer – at the tail-end of his productive career as a playwright here – was alert to it, and let it drift like a stinging haze across the stage. In major part, the play is a touching and bleakly amusing account of an elderly, wheezing, rather henpecked former collier, Pasmore, celebrating – or trying to celebrate – his diamond wedding anniversary with his wife and three grown-up children, somewhere in the North near the coast. Yet, ineffably combining the personal with the political, it also reads like an epitaph for the 20th century.
It begins in the middle of the night with the now spent Pasmore recalling his youthful exploits with the Royal Naval Air Service, sailing for Odessa during the Russian Revolution: “Orders came from Winston Churchill. ‘Save the Tsar!’” The Tsar, as we know, could not be saved, and Pasmore’s widened horizons thereafter shrank to a make-do-and-mend life of backbreaking, lung-busting toil down t’pit.
Storey – who died in March – was consciously mining the same seam that had produced In Celebration, his 1969 Royal Court hit set around a 40th wedding anniversary reunion. The characters are notably different (drawn in fact from an early-seventies novel) but once again he invested his own life-story – the intellectually get-ahead, and thereby estranged from his roots, son of a Yorkshire miner – in the writing, and every line sings with rueful authenticity.
Attaining a Chekhovian richness by way of dour kitchen-sink realism, Alice Hamilton’s exemplary in-theround revival finds a frail, stooped Ian Gelder perfectly cast as the workcrippled octogenarian, enduring his long-suffering (or so she thinks) missus’s barbs with a resolved grin that can slip into a pained grimace.
Anyone who has known an old, married couple will recognise the tragicomic mix of bickering resentment and residual affection. The point-scoring even entertainingly extends here into the crossword solving, but there’s a heartbreaking moment of rebuffed sentimentality when the paterfamilias gives his crotchety sweetheart a ring she can’t bring herself to thank him for: “You could have bought me flowers.”
Storey is commendably evenhanded, all the same. “It’s a wonder he does anything at all, the advertising that goes on before he starts,” Sue Wallace’s floral-dressed, thornyspirited Mrs Pasmore comments, nailing her hubby’s capacity for wounded self-pity – while her offspring (Colin Tierney’s aloof, tortured academic Colin, Sarah Belcher’s forthright Wendy and Connie Walker’s appeasing Eileen) look on in divided loyalty and shuffling awkwardness. She voted for Mrs T, did Mrs P. “I voted for common sense,” she avers, defiantly, aghast at the “I haven’t had this, I haven’t had that” mentality of the youth of today. A now bygone youth, of course, but in many respects, for all its period particulars, this is no museum piece.