Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005

Petrograd
Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dolan Cummings
posted 29 August 2005

'I'm a young woman looking for an alternative, and Islamic fundamentalism holds no great appeal.'

This neat expression of a sentiment that must be shared by millions of young women around the world comes from Ava, a young playwright who bears more than a passing resemblance to her own author Van Badham, whose politically-charged work has been a regular highlight of the Fringe for several years.

A whole generation has now grown up in the West with Communism no more than a vague memory from childhood, not much more real than Ronald Reagan or Wonder Woman. Van/Ava wants to write a play that will remind the world of a time when the West faced a more formidable challenge than 'a bunch of thoroughly pissed off Arabs', and one that represented hope for those who wanted an alternative society, even if not quite along the lines of the Soviet Union itself.

Ava's project is complicated by factors outside her control, however, and Badham skillfully draws a parallel between Ava's authorial frustrations and those of the revolutionaries. Revolutions never go according to a prearranged script, after all. In Ava's case it is the fact that her play has been commissioned and is to be directed by an old flame that complicates things; she is never really in charge. More than that, her naïve view of the revolution is quite at odds with the reality. Having consulted an old tutor, she moves the action from the revolution itself to the early Brezhnev era (the tutor's specialism), perhaps unwittingly underlining the fact that the ultimate result of the revolution itself was something nobody had ever planned.

My favourite moment is when Ava imagines herself in the midst of her own play in its revolutionary phase and is appalled to find her Bolshevik characters shooting revolting peasants. 'Are they Whites?' she asks, trying to understand. 'No,' reply the Bolsheviks, 'they're Greens, Socialist Revolutionaries'. The complexity of the revolution, with its ruthless faction fighting, does not fit with Ava's romantic vision. (And of course, Badham's witty use of the little-used term Greens to describe the Bolsheviks' unwashed rivals is a nod to the fact that the political concerns of Lenin's party were also very far from those of today's leftwing radicals, herself included.)

The idealism Ava had hoped to capture then gives way to two kinds of cynicism in the Brezhnev era. On one hand, know-nothing piety and loyalty to the regime, personified by the earnest daughter of a party apparachik, and on the other a nihilistic rejection of politics and society altogether, personified by the rock'n'roll rebel boyfriend she steals from her best friend.

At the end of Badham's play, Ava is left confused rather than inspired by her engagement with Communism, but still idealistic, still looking for an alternative. Possibly Badham would rather be writing trumpet-blasting political plays about the imminent revolution than soul-searching about a failed one, but Petrograd is a more honest exploration of what what political idealism means today than any polemical treatment of contemporary politics. And paradoxically, in lingering on the past, Badham somehow manages to create a genuine sense of optimism about the future.