Review: BOOGIE ON THE BONES, Omnibus Theatre

In the USA, Marlon Brando had already invented ‘The Teenager’ and Elvis Presley had sent the concept rocketing into the stratosphere. In the UK, we had our own cockney sparrer, Tommy Steele, and were about to get, er…, Cliff Richard. In the USSR, they had… well, they had Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalin and letting a chink of light shine in that dark empire. Okay, it doesn’t quite sum to the collapse of the old order, but a new generation unburdened by war were asserting themselves. 

In Moscow, the rebels very much with a cause, were the self-styled ‘Stilyagi’, the cool dudes and sexy chicks who wore yellow ties, red tights and sharp threads and listened to American music. Black American music. They danced to jazz too, underlining my favourite definition of such activity - ‘the vertical expression of horizontal desire’. Well, the apparatchiks of an authoritarian state would not take that lying down, not then and not now. Not there and not here either. Transgression is a powerful force and is usually met with one too.

WithinTheatre’s ensemble cast of actor-musicians tell interlocking love stories through song, movement and dialogue, conjuring hope, resistance and, ultimately, a flattening of joie-de-vivre, as the weight and cruelty of the Russian state outguns them. That’s hardly a spoiler if you know what happened there in the 50s, 60s, 70, 80s, 00s, 10s and 20s.

There is an added whiff of authenticity in the air too, as the company are all of Slavic heritage and sometimes break into impenetrable tongues, never quite losing that wonderful lilt when speaking English. Russia, perhaps most clearly in its national anthem, is, as ever, simultaneously compellingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful.

There won’t be much to surprise many in the audience as Daria Besedina script stays fairly close to stories we might expect to see. The lovers who delight in the arrival of a baby before they realise that their old life of carefree clubbing will have to end - an echo of Sonya and Vanya. There's the doctor by day and dancer by night who gets a knock on the door. The kid who has to choose between his girlfriend and his internship in the promised land of New York City. The girl whose liberation just leads to another kind of prison - that of romantic disappointment.

But the storylines are really a prop for contemporary songs written by men and women detained by the authorities, for super choreography by Anna Korzik and Wren Perkins, for spectacular costumes by Anastasiia Glazova and for clever direction by Sofia Barysevich. There are times when the work feels as much performance art as it does theatre, the storytelling multi-layered and the aesthetic shifting, as optimism and joy gives way to oppression and disappointment.

The drama seeps away in the last 30 minutes or so, as the inevitable denouements play out, sapping the energy that characterised the previous hour. That might be a consequence of the structure and the narrative arc, but it does diminish a production that is at its best when it pushes back, theatrically and narratively, against stultifying convention. 

The company represents its peoples well and has a big heart - and don’t the inheritors of the ‘Stilyagi’, nearly 70 years on, need that.  

Boogie on the Bones at Clapham Omnibus until 25 October

Photo images: Varvara Burtseva