Russia’s present-day aggression inevitably ripples through new play Firebird, which is set in Soviet-occupied Estonia in the late 1970s, ending as the USSR invades Afghanistan to install a pro-Moscow leadership to protect its own interests.
I say new play because with Firebird, writer Richard Hough has created something that is more than an adaptation and with a very different feel from Peeter Rebane and Tom Prior’s 2021 film, and it isn't just the sweeping panoramic vistas that had to be cut to create a 90-minute stage version.
I like the ambiguity of Hough’s Colonel Kuznetsov, a composite of the film’s Colonel and love’s nemesis, the venomous Major, and also Nigel Hastings’s performance, which has you on shifting sands, unable to predict which will prevail from one scene to the next. This in part contributes to the sense of peril for Private Sergey Serebrennikov and career pilot Second Lieutenant Roman Matvejev when they embark on an affair punishable by five years' hard labour under the oppressive and intolerant regime of the time.
Sorcha Kennedy plays their friend, the lively and feisty Luisa, the Colonel’s secretary and a would-be medical student. Luisa’s voice is the vehicle through which we hear the mothers whose sons serve in the current conflict, but Hough has not considered her character sufficiently. As a result, Luisa sits anachronistically between the men, lacking credibility and with an all too evident 21st century sensibility watering down a rage and shame she is entitled to whilst also absorbing the blame for their duplicity.
Director Owen Lewis has the affair between the two men flash with substanceless lust, which makes Roman’s move to Moscow in pursuit of Sergey, now at drama school in the capital, seem speculative at best.
Robert Eades doesn’t embody the easy glamour written for Roman as the dashing pilot who can get French champagne and Spanish oranges smuggled onto the base, and there is little chemistry between him and Theo Walker’s compliant Sergey.
I've not read Sergey Serebrennikov’s autobiography, which is the basis for Firebird, both play and film, but this story requires there to be credible and meaningful love between Roman and Sergey, because without it, Roman is merely a coward, his dilemma has no stakes and his choice is unheroic. And what would that make Sergey?