In Stalin’s Daughter, David Lane’s powerful and disturbing monologue presents us with a haunting psychological examination of the later life of Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.
Uprooted and transient after her defection to the United States three decades earlier, the story opens with Svetlana arriving by taxi in Clifton, a quaint neighbourhood of Bristol. As the taxi pulls away, Svetlana’s wide, slightly teary eyes convey an unsettling mixture of hope and anxiety as she looks to establish another new life in yet another new country.
Now in her 60’s, Svetlana rents a dingy flat and re-invents herself as Miss Phyllis Richards. Longing to be integrated into her new community, we see her tentatively flirting with the local greengrocer, on whom she has a crush, and dancing at the Women’s Institute.
But hiding her true identity means that Svetlana is always ‘observing not participating’.
Her recollections are at times bitter-sweet and convey a nostalgic yearning for the mother country she has chosen to turn her back on. But more harrowingly, her attempts to move on as Phyllis and other subsequent identities are constantly thwarted by the terrifying childhood memories which pervade her everyday life. These ‘poison memories’ are personified by the disturbingly ever-present Leika, an imaginary playmate once invented by Svetlana’s tyrannical father to keep his daughter in her place.
At the centre of all this, Kirsty Cox is powerful, convincing and moving as Svetlana, finely portraying the inner turmoil of the daughter desperately wanting to live an ordinary, unfettered life in the present but forever shackled by the ghosts of an extraordinary past.
Much praise also goes to David Lane’s relentlessly rhythmic, wonderfully poetic text, which Cox delivers uninterrupted for a full seventy minutes – a remarkable achievement in itself.
Rialto, Dyke Road until May 17.
You must be logged in to post a comment.