The Drumks
***

The Grain Store
**

The RSC’s “Revolutions” programme is a theatrical exploration of Russia and the former Soviet Union, which kicks off here with two ambitious new commissions.

The Drunks, by Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov, rendered in spicily idiomatic English by Nina Raine, depicts a power struggle in an obscure Russian town.

Ilya (Jonjo O’Neill) staggers back from the war in Chechnya to find himself acclaimed as a hero. Around him whirls a maelstrom of corruption, egomania and lubricious booziness, as the right to parade him is squabbled over by the mayor (Brian Doherty) and the bristlingly thuggish police chief (Darrell D’Silva).

While Ilya is a pawn, the rest of the town seems set to tear itself apart over him. One scene, in the local bathhouse, has the mayor and police chief facing off; its mix of locker-room badinage and partisan nastiness sums up the character of this mustardy, large-limbed piece.

Anthony Neilson’s cacophonous and startlingly kinetic production is full of bold images and zest. We feel as though we are watching a big, bilious cartoon larded with magic-realist gimmickry and a cheeky S&M aesthetic that’s part Tarantino, part Torture Garden. The performances are arresting. Besides menacing D’Silva, Richard Katz stands out as a loquacious writer, and Christine Entwisle as a glacial mayoral aide.

Where The Drunks inhabits the chaotic present, Natal’ia Vorozhbit’s The Grain Store seeks to illuminate a gruesome chapter of the past. Set in a peasant community in Ukraine between 1929 and 1933, as Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan unfolds, it shows the familiar rhythms of rural existence being shaken up by a radical programme of collectivisation.

The “steel horses” of mechanised agriculture carve a swathe through the established order. The local church becomes a granary, and its bells are melted down to be used for more demonstrably Soviet purposes.

Vorozhbit’s play pictures the fracturing of friendships, the spread of propaganda and the gradual, devastating effects of the new agricultural philosophy. People are reduced to eating manure, and a meal of hedgehog sounds like a feast. Famine snips at guts. Stories of cannibalism circulate, and bickering multiplies.

There are moments of broad comedy but mostly this is an ashen spectacle. The Ukrainian famine, known as the Holodomor, is believed to have killed almost four million people. It is a subject worthy of detailed exposition but hard to dramatise without becoming austere.

Michael Boyd’s production contains a good deal of nimble work, and the technical aspects (as in The Drunks) have been managed with neatness and wit. There are fine performances, too, from Kathryn Hunter, John Mackay and Forbes Masson, while Sam Troughton’s “agitator”, psychotically wide-eyed, will stick in the mind for a long time.

But the storytelling feels strenuous. Although The Grain Store presents a disturbing vision of socialist dogma degenerating into corrosive megalomania, and poet Sasha Dugdale has crafted an at times seductive translation, its cavalcade of grim episodes seems exhausting rather than tragic.
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