Even by the standards of the Hampstead Theatre, which seems to have a tin ear for new writing, this play by Penny Gold is a real turkey. It tells the story of Mikhail Gorbachev and his family during the three days in August 1991 when hardliners in Moscow detained them in their presidential holiday residence in the Crimea during an unsuccessful coup in Moscow. One day some playwright may create a great Shakespearean political drama around these events, which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but this isn't it. While all the key events were taking place in Moscow, Gorbachev and his family were forced to sit on the sidelines, unable to communicate or influence what happened, until Boris Yeltsin pulled their chestnuts out of the fire and they returned to Moscow. The only moment of drama in the Crimea was a confrontation between a defiant Gorbachev and a delegation from the coup plotters trying to make him resign, but in this play it inevitably happens offstage and we don't see it. So what we get is two hours of the Gorbachev family sitting around and talking overblown dialogue that veers between fake emotion, banal cliches and mawkish sentimentality. They come on stage and go off again, tell each other things they know already (it's called exposition), occasionally squabble and fall over for no apparent reason. Mostly they sit and wait around looking stressed while waiting for their fate to be decided elsewhere. That's the sort of Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern predicament that a great writer like Tom Stoppard can turn into a play packed with insight. Here we get phoney emotion and corny melodrama, raised voices and fake suspense -- none of which is a substitute for real drama.
Here I have to declare an interest; the political events of 1991 in Russia were once my journalistic special subject, so to speak. In August of that year, after ten months at Harvard, I was in London busy completing a biography of Boris Yeltsin when the coup happened. Six weeks later, the book was on sale, complete with a hastily written extra chapter, thanks to my American publisher pulling out all the stops. In November 1991, I drove along the clifftop road west of Yalta and looked down on the rocky promontory at Foros where Gorbachev's hideous modern presidential retreat was standing empty. Even today the loft of my house is stuffed with cardboard boxes full of transcripts of Gorbachev's voluminous speeches. The real Gorby was a charismatic and compulsive talker but a poor listener whose political encounters turned into monologues. Yeltsin's speeches were a lot shorter and more to the point. The two men loathed each other.
Penny Gold seems to have based her play almost entirely on the reminiscences of Gorbachev and his wife Raisa, so her grasp of the politics of the period is shaky. Her idealised Gorbachev describes himself as the duly elected president of the Soviet Union, but he was no such thing. The main reason why he had no political legitimacy was that he owed his authority entirely to the Communist party and had never stood for election anywhere. She shows him as a saintly reforming figure stabbed in the back by his scheming subordinates just at the point where he was about to turn the Soviet Union into a humane socialist paradise. In fact the Soviet Union was in a de facto state of collapse by 1991, its economy was in freefall thanks to Gorbachev's bungled reforms and his own authority had melted away as he sacked reformers and liberals and replaced them with hardliners and conservatives. The failed coup only hastened the demise of Gorbachev himself and the party of gangsters he headed. Penny Gold's introduction to the play spells out her own nostalgia for the Soviet Union quite clearly: At the time of writing, the American 'neo-cons' continue to assert that with their economic and military might, the triumph of global capitalism is inevitable. Socialism, they say, is dead. Well, we'll see. She sees the defeat of Gorbachev by Yeltsin as a disaster because it opened Russia's door to, horror of horrors, Western-style free market capitalism and consumerism. That's the traditional view of the socialist Hampstead intelligentsia, assiduously propagated by the Guardian in the 1990s. The poor Russians would be far better off if they had remained under Gorbachev-style socialism, without iPods, foreign holidays, cars and washing machines, still queuing patiently for the odd scrap of sausage in a way that anyone in Hampstead would find intolerable. I find that kind of attitude patronising and offensive, and any Russians unwise enough to waste their money on seeing this play will feel the same. For the record, I think the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism were both good things. Gorbachev was a humane figure with a genune horror of political violence, and his extraordinary role in ending the division of Europe without bloodshed puts all of us in his debt. But his economic legacy was disastrous and his attempt to preserve communism while simultaneously introducing free elections and democracy was a complete non-starter. By August 1991 he was a washed-up political failure who had run out of options, a sorcerer's apprentice who ended up destroying everything he was trying to preserve.
Penny Gold quite obviously never stood with Russians in a queue for sausage in 1991, though she may possibly once have seen the Cherry Orchard. She seems to picture Russians as dreamy romantics who love nothing better than to reminisce about steppes and birch trees. The results are unintentionally hilarious. Raisa witters on about how Gorbachev's mother used to lean back against the birch tree in her home village. But in Stavropol, near the Black Sea, I suspect the nearest birch tree is several thousand miles away. It's like talking about olive trees growing in Scotland. And she hasn't bothered to learn that outside the immediate circle of friends and family, Russians don't use first names on their own, but a more formal combination of first name and patronymic. To have the KGB general addressing Gorbachev as 'Mikhail' rather than 'Mikhail Sergeyevich' or 'comrade president' is ridiculous. It's equally absurd to show Gorbachev telephoning Yeltsin and calling him 'Boris' instead of 'Boris Nikolayevich'. And it would be nice for once to hear Russian names correctly pronounced, but in a city with tens of thousands of native Russian speakers roaming the streets, that seems to be too much to ask of a London theatre.
To compensate for the lack of real drama, Penny Gold puts in moments where the stage goes dark and we see projections of the Tsar and his family at the time they were held hostage and executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. This is supposed to illustrate Raisa's fears that her family might suffer a similar fate. I have to confess I have never read Raisa's memoirs, but I cannot imagine that this hardline Marxist-Leninist would ever compare her family's fate to that of Nicholas II and Alexandra. The effect on stage of the projections accompanied by sombre music and volleys of bullets is just overblown.
Will poor old Gorby be dragged to London to see this play, clutching his Louis Vuitton bag? I do hope not, for his sake. At the first preview I spotted quite a few fellow ex-Muscovites leaving at the interval, including one very senior British diplomat who knew Gorbachev well. Although I found the play's politics distasteful and its portrayal of Russia and the Russians full of silly mistakes, none of this would have mattered to me if it had been well written. After all Shakespeare didn't much bother with historical accuracy in writing about Richard III, and I doubt if he knew much about Danish politics when he wrote Hamlet. Fiction is always far better than fact on stage anyway.
What is it about the Hampstead Theatre? It's a lovely modern venue with a long and comfortable bar, a loyal audience and a great stage and auditorium. But it obviously has nobody capable of distinguishing between good plays and bad ones. This car-crash of a production, due to transfer to the Nuffield in Southampton (where I first saw professional theatre in the mid-1960s) can't really be blamed on the actors, led by Isla Blair as Raisa and Julian Glover as Gorbachev. Unfortunately Glover is a decade too old to be a convincing 60-year-old, and he sometimes comes across as a querulous pensioner. Robert Demeger as the sinister KGB man Plekhanov doesn't convince, but the lines he is given to speak are so ridiculous that it really isn't his fault. Anna Hewson and Roger May as daughter and son-in-law have an easier task, and their young daughters are played with natural verve. The set by Robin Don (responsible for the stunning Emperor Jones recently at the National) captures much of the ghastliness of late-Soviet official kitsch, though some elements of it are out of place. If Gorbachev once won the Red Banner of Labour for driving a tractor at harvest time, then the cast of The President's Holiday deserve the same award with triple stars for driving this load of drivel around the stage.