Arcola to mark Russian Revolution’s 100th anniversary with season of plays

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, on a Bolshevik propaganda poster. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

With Trump, Brexit and an immigration crisis in full swing, 2016 has the potential to be one of those landmark years that will resonate down the decades.

And, as we tread cautiously into 2017, the Arcola Theatre is marking 100 years since one of the defining events of the last century – the Russian Revolution.

Revolution is a season of five plays that explores the causes and impact of the Russian Revolution a century on.

First up next month is a new production by the internationally-acclaimed director Helena Kaut-Howson of The Lower Depths, Maxim Gorky’s masterful portrait of the left-behind and disenfranchised “lost souls” of Russia.

“The Russian Revolution was very important, it created these large class argument plays which we take for granted these days,” says Mehmet Ergen, Artistic Director of the Arcola.

“It was an optimistic period but after the revolution a lot of writers got in big trouble, because the the state was trying to control everything.

“It was a great mood change in America as well when Orson Welles was involved in America’s Federal Theatre Project plays. It changed playwriting forever really.”

An ensemble cast will be performing The Lower Depths as well as a production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard in March – directed by Ergen himself.

“It gets done a lot but there are different new versions. This version is written by Trevor Griffiths who wrote the play that became The Party.

“It’s a Marxist perspective, taking away that whinging we’re losing our estates aspect and concentrating on the things to come.”

East 15, a troupe of local student actors, are to star in Dusty Hughes’s Futurists, a tale of artists in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, as well as Heart of a Dog by The Master and Margarita author Mikhail Bulgakov.

The rarely performed play is a satire in which a professor implants the sexual organs of a man inside the body of a dog.

The season also sees a specially-commissioned work by Hackney-born playwright Oladipo Agboluaje.

New Nigerians is a contemporary comedy about African politics.

“We wanted to commission a piece that shows the effect of Soviet involvement in the Third World and particularly in Nigeria,” says Ergen.

Ergen cites change to the political landscape, with the rise of right-wing parties in Europe and beyond, as making the Revolution season timely in more ways than one.

“Populist movements are worth considering as a slap in the face.But afterwards that change can easily turn into something else – a totalitarian state for example.

“So it’s a good to have a reminder that only 100 years ago the world was swinging in a very different way.”

Revolution Season
11 January –25 March
Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL