BWW Reviews: DONKEY HEART, Trafalgar Studios, January 8 2015

Moses Raine's intense new play, Donkey Heart (continuing at Trafalgar Studios until 31 January), is a kind of EastEnders on the Moskva. There's a family tearing itself apart, outsiders welcomed warmly (but never quite accepted) and bleak humour, much of it from the world-weary eye of an ageing patriarch. This being Moscow 2015, there's plenty that bubbles below the surface, as the eighty-year embrace of Marxism-Leninism is still unravelling a quarter-century on.

Though this kind of play has its fans - and garners many good reviews - I confess that I cannot engage with the style sufficiently to be wholly objective in my thoughts. My lack of sympathy (for unsympathetic characters) so fogs my view of the plot that it never really gets through to me..

Lisa Diveney's Sasha is so uptight that she is hard to watch, especially close up. There's some fine acting there, but in service of a character who sets everyone on edge in the play - and some of us in the audience too. Likewise, James Musgrave's sulky, aggressive teen, Petya, is a convincing depiction of a credible lad, but so negative one almost wants him to fail to bribe his way out of National Service in order to get his attitude re-aligned in Ukraine. Their father Ivan (Paul Wyett) is utterly selfish, an irredeemable bastard, and his father Alexander (Patrick Godfrey) gets most of the best lines and delivers them with a twinkle in the eye, but even he loses some sympathy with a humourless tirade against the Hammer and Sickle T-shirt of naive, apologetic, dim English visitor (and would-be lover of Sasha) Tom (Alex Large).

Rather like Chekhov's Gun, once we're introduced to Tom's iPhone (with its voice recording app) we know it's going to be used later and we know it's going to make a heavy-handed point about the methods of the KGB being revived not in a state, but in a state's microcosm, a family. There are plenty more parallels drawn between the worlds of Alexander (wartime privations and Stalinist terror), Ivan (Perestroika and transition) and Sasha (cosmopolitanism and cynicism), but quite a bit of it is shouted and lost a little in the noise. Depth of emotional trauma should not be proportionate to volume of speaking - because we miss the nuance.

So, not for me - but many will enjoy this claustrophobic, emotional black comedy, with its examination of a family and a state in crisis.

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