Élizaviéta Bam
Duska Radosavljevic
The Stage, Edinburgh, Thursday, August 14, 2003

If you have never heard of Daniil Harms, this is one of those shows where you really need to read the programme before going in. The key issue is that, due to the early Soviet authorities’ control of the artists, Harms and his colleagues resorted to a kind of expression that was absurd and opaque yet also humorous and perfectly addictive for those who understood it.

Harms, for his art, died under arrest in a psychiatric hospital and in mysterious circumstances. His rare surviving full-length play Elizavieta Bam is a lively allegory of an individual’s struggle against irrational cruelty, power mechanisms and injustice.

The Russian expatriate Oleg Kisseliov directs the bilingual Canadian ensemble with great charm and inspiration in this production, which resembles a gothic, geometrical dream. His premise is that we are all Elizavieta Bam and that she is ever present.

Aesthetic accomplishment and pure theatrical feast aside, in the aftermath of yet another new world order-asserting war, he might just have a point.

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