An unsettling expressionist atmosphere dominates The Last Word, a play about women politically persecuted by the Russian State.
The show opens with Alla Gutnikovathe, the first of nine women played by Alisa Khazanova, speaking as if to a Russian court; her words, like those of the other women in this play, are derived from the actual court appearances of the women.
Her supposed crime of having published a magazine that supported students protesting against the regime is projected onto the back wall. Across the back of the stage, the mysterious figure of a partially naked man slowly rolls across the stage. Between many of the brief fragments of each woman’s speech in English, which also appear in surtitles, there is a song, the translation of which is projected onto the front of the stage scrim screen.
Among the persecuted women to appear before us is Yuia Tsvetkova, facing between two and six years in prison for posting online drawings of a vulva. The arrested activists we meet also include Natalya Gorbanevskaya who in 1968 demonstrated in Red Square against Russian troops in Czechoslovakia, for which she was subjected to psychiatric treatment; after all, if you object to the Russian state, there must be something wrong with your mind.
A particularly exciting moment in the show is the appearance of a member of Pussy Riot flinging her arms in the air and dancing at a standing microphone.
Occasionally, the face of a woman speaking will simultaneously appear from a different angle on the back screen and on the front scrim screen giving the appearance of one of those disturbing Big Brother images where there is no escape from being known by others.
The bloodied, rolling man (perhaps a newborn to the world) is washed and cleaned by the woman. Later, wearing some kind of military hat and costume, he will take a more authoritarian pose.
The stage lighting often shifts direction and colour, at one point bathing the performance in a disconcerting red glow.
Although the style and mood of the sixty-minute performance grab our attention, the brief words of the women can feel remote and largely unmemorable. There is too little to emotionally engage with, either of the specific injustice of the women we hear or the larger issue of the appalling persecution of people in Russia for the most trivial reasons.
The final moments of the show give us a glimpse of that horrific persecution with the names of over eighty prosecutions for so-called crimes as vague as “extremism” being projected onto the scrim screen.
Despite this predictable persecution of even the slightest signs of resistance to the current Russian regime, people continue bravely to protest. Since the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in February 2022, according to the Russian non-governmental organisation OVD, there have been 20,000 people detained at anti-war protests in Russia, with nearly 900 of those being prosecuted.