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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Out of a House Walked a Man
by Daniil Kharms
Trotsky once said that the nightingale of poetry sings only in the dusk of revolution, but the new art forms which flourished after the Russian Revolution were confronted all too soon by the rise of the Stalinist class. As the new bureaucracy fought to establish itself, it had to crush not only the revolution but the great artistic innovations that it spawned. Shostakovich, Einsenstein, Mayakovsky were all faced with repression. The trick became using the newly developed abstract forms of modernism to criticise the misery and repression that came with the new ruling class.
Daniil Kharms, whose work is compiled into Out of a House Walked a Man, was a Russian poet. He formed the Association for Real Art in 1927 and wrote, ‘When you come to us, forget everything that you have been accustomed to seeing in the theatre.’ He was arrested in 1931 and charged with ‘distracting the people from the task of industrial construction with transient poetry.’ Although he was a banned writer, Russians kept his books and enjoyed the absurdities which reflected the absurdities of their own lives.
The production begins with a brief look at Kharms’ ideas and extracts from his work before fixing on one story. On the surface it is a comic nightmare about an old woman who dies on Kharms’ living room floor and what he should do with the corpse which, to make matters more difficult, refuses to stay dead. The theme of the old woman has far greater depth in Russian literature, however. Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Gogol all used old women to highlight crisis and inequality in Tsarist Russia. In this play the old woman (who refuses to die) seems to be a reference to the re-emergence of crisis and inequality as the first Five Year Plans are introduced. You are never sure – is she really dead, did she dream it all, is it Kharms, or one of Kharms’ stories you are witnessing? Is the reference to a red-haired man, who amounted to nothing, his opinion of Lenin or Lenin’s ideas? Is his problem with writers’ block really about the gagging of writers under Stalin?
The production combines fine music and brilliant set design with high quality acting and the actors’ commitment to the play shines through. Initially two hours without an interval seemed rather daunting, but the clever mixture of humour and violence, cruelty and tenderness, and most of all an acknowledgement of the audience’s participation in the event, make it engrossing throughout.
Kharms uses absurd human logic to highlight the absurd reality of his time. This is the sort of play that will disappear if the government persists in cutting funding to the arts. So if you want a change from set piece theatre that is neither pretentious or inaccessible, this absorbing play is well worth seeing.
Out of a House Walked a Man plays at the National Theatre, London, in repertory.
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