Russia, Freaks & Foreigners by James MacDonald, (Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Reviewed by Mel Dadswell

Russia, Freaks & Foreigners is a set of three original performance texts written for students in the School of Performing Arts at Exeter University, where the author, Dr James MacDonald, is a fellow.  His constant theme for the past twenty-five years has been various aspects of Russia.  As a disabled playwright MacDonald has a visceral understanding of social alienation; as an American by birth he confronts Russia, initially at least, as the ultimate alien ‘other’.  Assisted in recent years by a Russian wife who grew up in the post-war Soviet Union, experiencing perestroika and its consequences (initially with enthusiasm and optimism), these texts are to a great extent the result of their collaboration.  MacDonald is, furthermore, a sort of honorary member, if not a ‘fellow’, of the ex-pat Russian community in his area.

The first play, Bread and Circus Freaks, described as a one-act vaudeville, was performed at the Finborough Theatre some years ago under the direction of Martin Harvey.  Its theme was inspired by a documentary showing the bread delivery to a rural village whose younger inhabitants have all left for the towns.  Into this bleak setting a young disabled woman arrives; she is artistically gifted but wants to be practically useful.  She is marginalized by her disability, whereas the art teacher who pursues her to the village is an outsider by ethnicity.  The elderly ‘Soviet construction’ keeper of the bread shop finds her world view (‘Happiness is another bourgeois conceit’) challenged by the new order.  The whole village is effectively redundant through market economics.  If in this play MacDonald presents a realism itself bordering on documentary, he constantly subverts it with sudden burlesque irruptions, a method that Martin Harvey has called ‘exploded realism’.  For James MacDonald, humour is an essential survival mechanism: not for him the pious solemnities surrounding an ‘issue’ like disability. He seeks here to portray ‘otherness’ in general and disability in particular through the prism of Bakhtin’s concept of ‘carnival’.

The Sweetheart Zone depicts life in the women’s section of a prison on the Volga. In the Soviet era (apparently) the women looked out for one another, but now a new competitive ethic of ‘each for herself’ prevails.  The disabled prisoners used not to produce gloves in the prison factory, but now they are to be fully integrated into the prison ‘community’ and do their share.

Emigrés is an unequivocally funny comedy bringing post-Soviet Russia to a Britain which finds it hard to understand.  The two main protagonists, involved in hotel and catering work in Scotland, manage to elude the immigration authorities and avoid the perils and pitfalls associated with their illegal work, only to be undone at the hands of a fellow Russian.

It used to be said that only a Stalinist regime or something nearly equivalent could mediate the affairs of Dostoyevsky’s characters, let alone get them to co-operate for the common good.  As if from within these characters, in the manner of small Russian dolls, MacDonald’s characters emerge.  In another setting they might equally constitute the germ of Truman Capote’s characters. In Bread and Circus Freaks, for example, it is a wonder that such benighted creatures, as perceived from an English mind-set, can summon the energy to inflict their ratty little mind games on one another.  All too often a real question evokes a rhetorical one in response.  In a ‘real world’, silence might be the easier option.  But herein lies the dramatist’s central dilemma: how to unpack and articulate for the stage the circumstances and thought processes, often barely self perceived, of people whose lives have been shriveled by privation and marginalization. In Emigrés, on the other hand, these ‘impossible’ people find themselves in an alien milieu: the goldfish outside its bowl is a different type of goldfish.  The ‘madman’ struggling with a foreign language becomes ‘sane’.

The collection concludes with essays from Peter Thomson, Emeritus Professor of Drama Studies and expert on Shakespeare, as well as an occasional slavist and Russian speaker; Martin Harvey, sometime associate director of the Northcott Theatre; Thomas Fahey and Su Elliott.

Mel Dadswell taught Russian at the University of Exeter and he was a founder member of the GB-Russia Society and the first editor of the East-West Review.