Journey of the soul

while taking a drunken ride on the Moscow metro. How it turned up more

than 20 years later as a world premiere play at The Traverse Theatre is

one of theatre's more unlikely stories. But it is that kind of a work.

And Erofeev was that kind of a writer.

He belonged to an intellectual under-class of alcoholics in the Soviet

Union of Brezhnev's period of stagnation. Their state of semi-permanent

anaesthesia had its counterpart in Western drug culture, but they were

treated more as holy fools than political dissidents. Drink might have

offered a way of stimulating imagination, a substitute for mystical

experience, or a means of escape from mainstream Soviet life. In any

case, widespread drinking had been actively encouraged under Stalinism

as a means of creating mass docility.

The only recorded act of political defiance in which Yerofeev

participated was an inebriated arson attempt on a local Communist Party

headquarters, an enterprise of such extravagant silliness that it was

not even taken seriously in the Soviet Union. The authorities eyed

Erofeev with indulgence. His main contact with the State was as a

regular guest of its drying-out clinics.

In the late 1960s he began writing his novel. If this implies any

sudden reform, with a sudden assumption of a new self-discipline, it

should be discounted. He wrote two-page episodes at a time for which he

received payment by way of vodka from the friends to whom he read it,

and it circulated in samizdat.

After its completion, he lost the thing on the metro. Or that was the

version given to the KGB when they made inquiries about how the

manuscript had found its way to Israel for publication, in 1973, in an

anthology called Ami. It has a certain tongue-in-cheek plausibility. The

novel is told by a chronic drunk on the suburban train line to Petushki.

This narrator shares the author's name, and among other things he loses

his suitcase and bottle on the train.

A year earlier, the manuscript had been in the hands of the Parisian

YMCA press who rejected it on the grounds it ''damaged the moral

reputation of the Russian people''. After the Israeli publication it was

translated into 17 languages. Strangely, the English translation, by an

American for an obscure university press, had a samizdat existence of

its own in photocopy form.

It was not this translation which brought the work to wider attention

in the English-speaking world, but the first publication of the novel in

Russia in 1989. Its appearance reflected a glasnost interest in

literature discrediting the moral corruption of the Brezhnev era, and

its publication in, of all things, a magazine called Sobriety and

Culture, suggested it was to be viewed as a cautionary tale to justify

Gorbachev's temperance zeal.

The illegalisation of sale of alcohol had only intensified interest in

a book which offered recipes for corrosive concoctions from meths,

distilled varnish, sock deodorizer, eau de cologne, shampoo, brake

fluid, and insecticide along with proprietary beers, vodkas, and

fortified wines. Yerofeev assumed a new cult status, and then he died

months later of cancer of the throat. His reputation as one of Russian

literature's unsung prodigies, a renegade who stood for the

individualism that perestroika was seeking to restore, was doubly

assured.

The Traverse had enjoyed great successes with A Man With Connections

and The Bench, two plays by the Soviet writer Alexander Gelman in

translations from the Russian by Glasgow poet and playwright Stephen

Mulrine. Mulrine was approached two years ago for possible follow-ups.

The name of Yerofeev cropped up by coincidence.

Simon Bailey, the then literary manager of The Traverse, had heard

about a BBC2 documentary on the writer. Mulrine, whose reputation as a

translator had been growing after the Gelman plays and extensive work on

Ludmila Petrushevskaya (including the remarkable Tron-Russian

co-production of Cinzano with a brilliant Scottish cast), had just

received Yerofeev's novel in a Russian anthology, along with a

recommendation.

Mulrine's translation and stage adaptation of Moskva-Petushki as a

single-hander was commissioned by The Traverse. As with the nature of

theatre projects it lay for a while, and the play turned up as Moscow

Stations in a Radio 3 production with Tom Courtenay last year.

Courtenay was so impressed with the piece that he began to sound out

Mulrine about a stage version. The actor was put in touch with The

Traverse, who still held the commission. The Traverse artistic director

teamed up with Tom Courtenay, and a remarkable world premiere opened at

the weekend, some 23 years after the manuscript slipped out of the

befuddled grasp of its author.

It makes sense to review it here. Courtenay, it should be said right

from the start, is the perfect actor to play the narrator/author of

Moscow Stations. Throughout his career he has specialised in roles as

sensitive victim who nevertheless reveals the strength of an inner life

and a durable integrity to resist the crushing effect of a state

monolith.

He lurches on, a hungover drunk in his pathetic plastic jacket and

shoes, bearded and dishevelled, clutching and fretting trousers which

hang loose on his scrawny rump, who is trying to assume the dignity of

standing up straight, but never quite achieving it. His eyes have the

kind of glaze that should lend his look a defeated cast, but we are held

by their restless quest, as though this derelict, this Venya, was

searching for a soul mate or a guardian angel among us.

The staging (in Tim Hatley's design) is beautiful in its strong

simplicity. A single platform of the Kursk station is raked steeply with

an accentuation of receeding perspective, so that it is like Venya's

personal ramp to heaven, whose gradient sends him reeling back down to

hell.

A single bench gives him respite from his Sisyphean endeavours, and

becomes the train carriage which will carry him in his futile attempt to

reach the Moscow suburb of Petushki, his idyll, his city of the mind

where the jasmine is always in flower, where a woman will meet him and a

child waits for him to bring presents.

Although this suburban line has its own apparent structure with a

progression of intervening stations, calling at Hammer and Sickle,

Kushkova, Reutova, Kuchino, and Nazaryevo, according to the overhead

announcement, we know long before he is ever told that nobody ever gets

to Petushki. Not the one he has in mind, at any rate. This is clearly a

journey of the soul.

En route, he tells us about his life, about the job he lost, the

accommodation he had to leave, his random theory of hiccups and

catastrophe, his blurred itemisations of drinks he has consumed and

cocktails he has devised, and his thesis of alcohol and Russian

literature. Like a good drunk he is a great mimic, and he plays roles

from Scheherezade to Christ.

Courtenay's performance is spellbinding, from its comic-turn opening

to its tragic conclusion. The character Venya's fate foreshadows that of

the author in his final illness, but a genuine catharsis is achieved in

the moving final scene.

A lost manuscript has found a lasting truth in Ian Brown's sensitively

weighted production, amplified by John Irvine's evocative sound design.

It continues until February 21, and resumes March 2-14.