Director Rupert Goold has struck gold again—with this musical adaptation of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 taut ninety-minute black and white film set in post-war Poland and Europe. Though I wouldn't call it a musical, rather a play with music, Polish folk songs and Elvis Costello blending in a romantic, lyrical ‘Zhivago and Lara’ thwarted love ambience.
Costello’s “I Do (Zula’s Song)” is reprised several times and ends the play. I hear something of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s “I Will Wait For You” (look up the lyrics, which are so apt in the context of the play) in its bittersweet melody, and wonder if he was influenced by it, too. It tugs at the heart.
The musical numbers stretch running time to two hours forty minutes with interval, which could do with some tightening in the second act, but I am not complaining, so drawn in am I into this frustrated love story between two damaged people, damaged by the communist regime.
The cold war has a dual meaning here. A love affair doomed from the start; two people with guilt and betrayal on their consciences. The Nazi occupation hangs over it all, too. Two totalitarianisms, one after the other, don’t do much for the human psyche. Time is out of joint for them.
Under the eye of crass apparatchik Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey), composer Wiktor (Luke Thallon) is auditioning singers for a folk ensemble, which will demonstrate the spirit of positive proletarian Poland across the socialist states.
In comes Zula (Anya Chalotra), who sings a Russian song, “Serdste” by Dunayevsky (again check out the lyrics—"love will visit you by accident”—so appropriate in this love story), standing out already from the rest of the ensemble. Her past history is not too salubrious either.
She is volatile, obstreperous, abrasive, challenging, yet weak and vulnerable, asked to spy on Wiktor by Kaczmarek whilst on tour in East Berlin. Wiktor will later be asked to be an informant for Poland on émigrés in Paris when he approaches the Polish consulate about returning home. But I’m jumping ahead…
In East Berlin, he defects, she was meant to but chickens out. For reasons we can only surmise. He builds a career in Paris, has affairs, visits prostitutes, drowns his sorrows in drink, till she turns up. She has married a Sicilian to be able to travel, and to find him. It’s all about selling one’s soul…
She stays, sings chansons in a jazzy cabaret, they live together, but she doesn't like western life, the ‘freedom’ bothers her. Hard to be an émigré. She returns to Poland, to her homeland. The Polish vice-consul advises him against it, but he can’t live without her. Back he goes to a fifteen-year prison sentence and broken fingers.
She does a deal and gets him out in five years. The pragmatic Kaczmarek is the winner in this cynical, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours, bribery-taking regime. They end it like Romeo and Juliet, together for all eternity, after swearing marriage vows to each other.
That’s the outline, but there is more to unstitch if you know how these regimes worked, the schizophrenic lifestyles, the fear, the despair, the corruption. We see the twenty-year journey evoked by changing music, from the late 1940s to the sixties.
Evie Gurney’s costumes chart the times. The faux idealism in colourful folk dancing in front of Stalin’s portrait on village and drab municipal hall walls, promoting allegiance to the Soviet Union, the sentimental joys of communist life and achievements, its soul-eroding lies... and their lives are eroded.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. The songs are lovely, the band is great, and the wit that writer Conor McPherson puts into Kaczmarek’s mouth humanizes him. Levey is a treat, bringing much-needed light relief to a tragic love story—you just have to compromise a little, make adjustments, and life can be fine.
The ensemble dances and sings with vigour, and Jon Bausor’s set uses every nook and cranny of the stage to best effect, Paule Constable’s lighting focuses the eye. Goold’s direction, as always, is sympathetic.
The leads work well together, playing contrasting personalities, both concealing secrets from the past. Thallon’s facial acting is superlative, whilst Chalotra never plays for sympathy, her infuriating petulance a hard act to pull off, but pull it off she does. They all do. Brilliant. I need to see it again.