BREAKING VLAD: Lenin’s Embalmers a dark riot
The story of ancient Egypt’s effort to preserve the earthy remains of their citizens is well known – through endless television documentaries, learned books and “B” grade Universal Studio horrors. But the 2600 B.C. Egyptian necromancers are pikers compared to the Soviets. That revered father of the revolution, Vladimir Lenin, who died in 1924, lies in state in his glass sarcophagus in Red Square looking as if he dropped in for an afternoon snooze. Dressed in sober black – his hands lying at his side. His reddish moustache is neatly trimmed.
No, it’s not a waxworks avatar. It’s the old radical himself. It has taken an army of scientists and keepers over the years to keep him daisy fresh.
This fascinating fun fact forms the basis of Edmonton playwright Vern Thiessen’s darkly comic play, Lenin’s Embalmers, a U of A Studio Theatre production at the Timms Centre for the Arts until Oct. 20.
Apparently Stalin (Doug Mertz) decreed the act to “keep the dream of the revolution alive” for future generations. Lenin, no believer in pseudo-religious icons, would have been horrified.
In Thiessens’s telling (based on the facts as presented in the book of the same name), one of Stalin’s aides (Griffin Cork) suggests two Jewish chemists to preserve the remains. It turns out the two (Boris and Vlad) are the Mutt and Jeff of Soviet science. The two dislike each other. They are adherents of different ideologies. The arrogant Vlad (Chris Pereira) is the woozy brain behind the duo – a drinker of awesome proportions with an eye for the ladies. Boris (Marguerite Lawler) is a dodgy con-man constantly trying to game the system. Yet the undynamic duo make it work – and a good thing, too, because it is made clear that failure means death.
It’s also nice to note that director Alexander Donovan has chosen a gender neutral cast on the premise that good theatre requires nothing but good acting.
The first half of the evening plays as farce. Director Donovan and playwright Thiessen are brothers from another mother when it comes to humour. The director picks up the writer’s playful sense of humour and runs with it. The two conspire to create characters that would be quite at home in a Monty Python sketch, or Armando Iannucci’s recent political satire, The Death of Stalin.
Marx haunts the stage – Groucho, that is. Thiessen might have made a nod to the philosophical aspects of immortal half-life, but this play is not about that. He keeps things light even during the lengthy expositions necessary to understand who’s doing what to whom. The embalming scene has comic overtones and is set to a spirited Slavic ditty. Apparently, Lenin is not so much embalmed as frozen with a few chemicals and some added make-up.
The play requires vast amounts of vodka to be consumed. Apparently the Russians at the time all had shot glasses tucked away in their persons in case someone opened a bottle.
The ghost of Lenin, as impishly portrayed by Thiessen himself, shows up to provide witty, sardonic comment on the proceedings. The shade is not above a shot or two himself. He tells bad jokes (“Three Russian prisoners meet in a Gulag…”), and keeps us chuckling with his gleeful commentary on the indignities his remains are subject to.
“I’ve become a joke – without a punchline,” he grouses.
It is a tribute to the writer and the director (and the able cast) that they are able to navigate a change of tone that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the evening. Stalin, who first registers as a caricature of a mad dictator, becomes increasingly paranoid. “Be quiet or I’ll kill you!” he bellows as the comedy turns dark.
Boris and Vlad are terrific creations easily carrying the evening, sliding from merry madcap levity to the terrors of immanent extinction. They may be tragicomic heroes but the two actors manage to draw their characters broadly while keeping them vulnerable enough to generate some empathy when Anti-Semitism, opportunistic politicians and professional jealousy set off their fall from grace. The commanding Mertz begins with his Stalin as a doltish nitwit and changes into something truly menacing. He’d be merely silly if he didn’t have the Jovian power to order instant death.
Sarah Emslie plays Nadia. Three of them, actually.
“I’m Nadia – but not the same one as before,” she tells us matter-of-factly. She brings a lively spunk to the roles, ranging in emotion from browbeaten through horny to peevish. Diego Stredel and Helen Belay play an entire muster of spies, minions, apparatchiks and assassins with great humour.
Photos by Ed Ellis
