Review: VASSA ZHELEZNOVA, Southwark Playhouse, June 17 2016

Vassa has built the shipping business up from her dissolute husband's inheritance and is damned if she's going to let Liverpool's striking dockers ruin her now. She's right into the Press too, who have incriminating evidence about him and won't be bought off. She's fighting her daughters as well, who have gone through their teenage rebellion years in different ways, but now both feel the need to be released from her all-encompassing control freakery. And, just to top things off, her step-grandson, whom she loves but sent to boarding school, is being reclaimed by his mother, an environmental protester who intends to take him on her next mission.

Vassa Zheleznova (at Southwark Playhouse until 9 July) is a bold re-imagining of Maxim Gorky's play, the setting shifted to Liverpool during the 90s, as industrial conflict swirls around. Director Rachel Valentine Smith locates all the action in Vassa's office, a black shiny space with just a hint of a dominatrix's lair, from which Sian Polhill-Thomas dishes out the punishment to anyone who comes within sound of her coruscating tongue. In a succession of power dresses, her hair severely drawn back, her features handsome and haughty, Polhill-Thomas's Vassa commands the stage, even as her grip on the business and family loosens.

She gets good support from a cast in which Andy McLeod impresses as Prokhov, Vassa's predatory brother-in-law, and Joss Wyre injects some much needed warmth as the sweet younger daughter Luda. If the acting does get a little shouty at times, well, emotions are running high and, given its Russian provenance, things are unlikely to wind up with everyone living happily ever after. It's pretty much full-on from start to finish.

Though an insightful lesson in the limits of ruthlessness as the default setting for problem-solving, unmitigated by real-life's demands for compromise, the play is flawed by a couple of missed opportunities. Presented all-through at about 100 minutes, it's a long time to spend in the company of so many characters who lack redeeming features and, though there are some bleak laughs, there is a feeling that we are witnessing a slow motion nervous breakdown and that can be hard work. There's not enough Liverpool / 90s in the work either - having got the accents right (though, as almost always happens, the cast do wobble in and out of Scouse), the location disappears, as the action concentrates on family relationships, somewhat sealed from the outside world.

It's a bold and laudable decision by Southwark Playhouse to stage a challenging work like this and, though much of it succeeds, ultimately it felt a little too much like an extended soap opera storyline tinged with a social and sexual politics undertow. That'll appeal to many, but it left me outside the dock gates with the braziers and bovril.

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