The Bear Dances

About the show

Moscow, Spring 1930. Two OGPU officers search the room of Father Anton Kirillitch, who has been banned from his church and ordered to stop preaching. He shares the room with Grigori Orlov, ejected from his chair at the university for a "reactionary" refusal to give a Marxist slant to his literature lectures. Both live in poverty, in half a room of Grigori's former house, now seized by the State. To visit Grigori come his son, Andrey, and his son's wife, Elizaveta, both 35, who eloped to England in 1914 and are now naturalised British. Andrey, a left-wing writer in London, is horrified by his father's treatment and by the workings of the Soviet régime. Elizaveta, a doctor in London, has tried the West and found it wanting. She is more open-minded about the USSR, and finds a non-sentimental attraction in the work to be done. Their marriage is in trouble: she no longer loves Andrey. Vera Levine, 19, Elizaveta's sister whom she last saw before the War, arrives, an "agricultural expert" full of youthful enthusiasm for the New Russia, along with Leonti Levine, their father, a former antiques-dealer now Inspector of Collective Farms in northern Ukraine. With the Levines is Vladimir Blok, 30, an OGPU official and Revolutionary Judge. Vera suggests that the returned émigrés visit "her" collective farm in Ukraine. Vladimir gives permission (Orlov son might perhaps be pressured to write positively about the USSR when he returns to London) and allows Grigori to accompany them. Act One closes with the arrest by the OGPU of Father Anton, who knows this means the Lubyanka and liquidation. Act Two takes place three days later at a railway station in western Russia, where the travelling party are waiting for a connection. Behind the political arguments, Elizaveta and Vladimir are sexually attracted; Andrey and Vera are falling in love. Leonti loathes Grigori from pre-Revolution days (they quarrelled over their children's elopement). When Leonti briefly leaves his luggage unattended, Grigori glances at Levine's pocket-book, finds something compromising inside, darts to the cloakroom to make a copy, then returns the book to the frantic Leonti, who thought it had been stolen. On the collective farm in Act Three, in the Soviet House, Vera is in her element and full of pride. We witness a workers' wedding where the Soviet girls dance with spirit. Elizaveta tells Andrey their marriage is over: she has chosen Vladimir and will stay on in the USSR. The atmosphere darkens with a series of peremptory trials presided over by Vladimir: crimes against the individual are punished leniently, crimes against property (and therefore the State) with terrible vengeance. When some peasants are accused of being kulaks and sentenced to the Gulag for "hoarding" small quantities of grain, Andrey, watching, can take no more. He snatches Blok's pistol and shoots him dead. He is seized and knows he will be executed. Grigori, to save his son, tells Elizaveta what he found in her father's pocket-book: Leonti has been smuggling goods across the nearby Polish frontier (an "anti-Soviet" activity). Elizaveta, he insists, must blackmail her father with the threat of telling the fanatical Vera, to smuggle Andrey across the frontier. Andrey, however, will only attempt the escape if his father comes too. Elizaveta confronts Levine, who, terrified of Vera, caves in. The telephone line is cut. After delivering Vladimir's funeral oration offstage (which we hear), a tearful Vera enters to say goodbye to Andrey before he is carried off to Kiev. After a minute or two, she realises that the muffled figure in the dark room she has been addressing is not Andrey, but Elizaveta. The Orlovs have escaped. Elizaveta hints at what has happened; we guess Levine will not return. Vera raises the alarm – in vain. The play ends with Elizaveta attempting to console her weeping sister.