The Curing Room
Presented by the appropriately named Stripped Down Productions, the fate of seven Soviet soldiers captured by enemy forces in southern Poland in the spring of 1944 is recreated in this play directed by Joao de Sousa as they are thrown into an underground chamber beneath a ruined monastery, locked in the former meat curing room and abandoned without food, water or clothing.
Rupert Elmes’ Captain Victor Nikolov is not coping with the loss of dignity or authority; his hand is bleeding from where his wedding band was torn from his finger. Matt Houston’s youthful Private Georgi Poleko, with some experience tending to animals on a farm back home is the closest they have to a medic, but without anything from which to fashion a bandage all he can do is suggest the captain sucks on the wound to keep it clean.
While Marlon Solomon’s Lieutenant Vasilii Kozlov tells them the officers were summarily executed and fed to the starving dogs the other men are still thinking strategy, discussing artillery movements and troop deployment, Harvey Robinson’s Senior Lieutenant Sasha Ehrenberg listening for Russian tanks in the distance and hoping that they are moving forward while Will Bowden’s Junior Lieutenant Leonid “Animal Killer” Drossov constantly challenges the weakening Captain Nikolov whose rousing speeches have tarnished as another cold dawn in captivity arises.
The veteran soldier, John Hoye’s Private Nils Sukeruk, has seen twenty years in the army and is conditioned to accept the chain of command, but is antagonistic to Georgi and openly bullies Thomas Holloway’s Private Yura Yegerov who Georgi tries to protect, his hearing damaged by the artillery he operates, his fragile mind crying out for home and his mother.
Inevitably, as they lick the dew from rocks and huddle for warmth a decision is made while Nikolov sleeps on which they need his endorsement to proceed, a lottery for one to be smothered to feed the rest which the captain refuses, saying he will not support the creation of martyrs and butchers, but when he eventually succumbs to blood loss what at first seems a brutal blessing to the starving men is undone when Georgi realises the captain’s neck has been broken.
Inspired by true events, it is unclear to what degree David Ian Lee’s script is recreation, interpretation or fiction; the linear timescale may be intended to indicate strict veracity to actual events but the resistance to use any theatrical innovation to expand the characters or their former lives beyond what they tell each other (much of which is revealed to be untruthful as the play progresses) results in an uninvolving experience, the audience never drawn into what is presented before them, never invited to consider how they would act or whether they would refuse to.
Confined to one group of characters in a single setting, all of them embittered soldiers with dwindling hope, the play is frustratingly static and stagnant and no parallels are drawn with other conflicts or abuses around the world, historic or present. Marking the scene breaks with a projected intertitle as the days mount up to over a month underground actually makes it in some ways a tedious exercise where an abstract timeframe would be more disorienting, and atmosphere only momentarily enters on day sixteen as, covered in blood, the lights dim as they consume their dismembered comrade.
Bowden, Robinson and Solomon are the best of the cast though this may be as Drossov, Sasha and Vasilii are by far the strongest roles. As ranking officer following the death of Nikolov, Sasha explains that he “devised a truth that needed telling” when he confesses he had not heard tanks in the distance, and goes further to tell them that even if they should be found it may not be salvation “I don’t want my humanity judged by men who have not crouched naked and lapped blood to eke out an hour of life.”
Despite it being a waiting game the men are poorly defined, the performances never feeling as raw and bare as the performers, and in fact the constant nudity is more of a distraction than an asset, almost a gimmick intended to draw an audience seeking to view uncovered skin rather than opened souls. The use of Yura as heavy handed comic relief doesn’t work; rather than throwing the black into contrast it dispels the mood too completely, and it is a constant irritation that even when they have crude bone implements that none of the men use them to work on the door to free them, however futile the attempt might have been.
The Curing Room continues until Monday 25th August and arrangements are anticipated for a transfer to London
