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Stray Dogs review – Russian poet's struggle against Stalin

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Park theatre, London
Anna Akhmatova is forced to choose between artistic integrity and saving her son in Olivia Olsen’s play

In 1935, Anna Akhmatova began writing Requiem in Soviet Russia. Her son, Lev, had just been arrested by the authorities and the poem, published decades later, became a seminal work on Stalin’s Great Terror. It was as much a mother’s lament as a testimony of a nation’s suffering: “Seventeen months I’ve pleaded / for you to come home. / Flung myself at the hangman’s feet”, she wrote plaintively of queuing outside the prison gates every day to receive news of Lev.

Her divided loyalties as a poet and a mother form the central tension in Olivia Olsen’s play. Just as Julian Barnes dramatised Shostakovich’s inner torments over the musical compromises he made to survive Stalin’s regime in The Noise of Time, so Akhmatova is shown going through similar moral and emotional tussles. Shostakovich’s compliance is repeatedly referenced here, although Olsen’s script ruminates on the bravery of Akhmatova’s choice – to sacrifice some poetic principles in order to save her son – alongside its ethical burden.

At Park theatre, London, until 7 December.

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