Edinburgh Festivals

Fringe 2001

Joe Stalin's Empire
Demarco Rocket Productions

Directed by Noel Witts, this is a potentially interesting and original piece of work both in its style and its content, which somehow just fails to hit the mark.

Using simple readings rather than a fully dressed performance, Witts has brought together a cast of four to read excerpts from the likes of Chekov and Havel, biographies and personal testaments from inhabitants of post-Stalinist Eastern Europe, all interlaced with music from the great Russian and Soviet composers.

The problem, however, is that the piece lacks direction. Witts informs us at the beginning that his motivation is an desire to understand more about Stalin's reign and its impact on the arts. Yet Joe Stalin's Empire fails to provide any novel insights in this regard. And although one can have little objection to the attempt to understand such a political phenomenon through theatre, Witts seems to believe his project may have valuable insights for understanding the conditions of the arts in contemporary Eastern Europe.

On a superficial level this may seem right-headed. What becomes clear, however, is that Witts understands Stalinism as little more than the authoritarian regime of Stalin the individual, and his work thus falls short of any coherent analysis of Stalinism as a social system in all its irrationalities. It may be too much to expect such analysis from a piece of theatre, but it is because this seems to be the aim of the work that its failure in this regard is so damning.

Added to this, the mixture of dramatic excerpts (which are necessarily underdeveloped and for this reason unsatisfying) with real-life testimonies (which are necessarily undramatical) makes for a confused and disappointingly undirected piece of work.