The Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg’s production of The Devils, based on the novel by Dostoevsky, is one of the extraordinary theatrical achievements of the last 40 years and one of the great experiences of my life – theatrical and otherwise. With a running time of around nine hours, it was also one of the longest. And I’ve seen it three times. That’s a lot of hours to give but none of them were wasted.
The first two occasions were in 1998 when the Maly played the Barbican in London. There were two options: watch it in three sections across three evenings, or do it all in one go – three hours per act, with an hour’s break between each. Being young, filled with Dostoevskian fervour, and still in possession of a stoic bladder, I did both.
The 90s were an incredible time for anyone interested in international theatre. With the fall of the iron curtain, long hidden theatre makers were suddenly able to share their work with new audiences in the west and those audiences were, in turn, captivated by the startling innovation of what they saw. At the forefront was the Maly Drama Theatre’s Lev Dodin. He and his student company’s combination of wildly imaginative, intellectually rigorous productions had most recently dazzled UK audiences with their devised works Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia, but The Devils was in another league. Developed with the Maly’s older company, it was a Russian epic on a par with the accomplishments of Dostoevsky himself.
Forged in long years of scene studies, improvisation, writing, rehearsing, performing then re-rehearsing, it was theatre on a scale I’d never experienced in British or Irish theatre. Text was important but Russia itself was there. Its people. Its history. The weight of its politics and its legacy of nihilism, revolution, death and redemption. The entire production revolved around the charismatic Pyotr Semak as the dead-in-the-soul aristocrat, Stavrogin, who filled the theatre with darkness. It was a terrifying performance, unbearable and unforgettable. But he was surrounded by stunning performances. From Maria Tychinina as the unwilling witness, Dasha, and Sergey Bekhterev as the manipulative revolutionary, Verkhovensky – who spent one astonishing scene eating an entire roast chicken to illustrate his character’s relentlessness – to Sergey Kuryshev’s heart-rending Kirillov, the engineer cajoled into using his suicide for the good of the cause and Igor Ivanov’s hilarious turn as the useless drunk Lebyatkin. Performed in Russian with English surtitles, amid a spare but haunting set, it was theatre of high-wire intensity, from which neither performers nor audience would go home unscathed. And it was demanding, exhausting even. Some couldn’t take it and left but most stayed. The Devils made everything that came after it seem pallid in comparison.
The last time I saw it was two years later in the Maly’s own theatre in St Petersburg. It was a much smaller stage, in far less grand surroundings but in their home town – and Dostoevsky’s – and the resonance was so great it felt like the company could make the very walls shake. Profound, merciless and all-consuming, it was a lesson in the power of uncompromising vision that I still think of now, with awe. At the time it sent me back to the novel which, in turn, led to the character-altering, confessional section of my novel The Lesser Bohemians. So those long hours spent in the theatre were pretty transformative in the end.
