Theater: Ghostly Cry

THE SUICIDE by Nikolai Erdman

This seriocomic drama is a relentlessly pumped-up footnote to Stalinist repression. It is a police-state curio dating from 1932. After 18 months of rehearsals, The Suicide was banned by the Moscow censors on the night of its dress rehearsal, and its author, Nikolai Erdman (1902-70), fell into abject disfavor.

The play's message is that an individual does not stand a ghost of a chance in a tyranny. Despite some farcically funny moments, and a brigade of song-and-dance gypsies—presumably immune to Communism's joyless coercions—The Suicide, as of 1980, iterates the obvious.

The hero, Senya (Derek Jacobi), is an everyman-nobody. He has no job, is supported by his wife and browbeaten by her mother. He decides to kill himself.

Immediately, he is lionized by a parade of advocates who relish the idea of a martyr's bearing witness to their pet creeds. A seedy intellectual, played with querulous pungency by John Heffernan, wants Senya to die for the valor of the intelligentsia, while a writer urges him to expire for the glory of art, and a faded beauty argues for the ideal of romantic love.

Senya does not keep his rendezvous with destiny, but Derek Jacobi does. Best known for the title role in the TV series I, Claudius, Jacobi makes his debut at Broadway's ANTA Theater a thumping virtuosic triumph. He is unfazed even by the giant Junglegym of a set. Toward the end of the play, Senya pleads with the faceless state: "Give us the right to whisper." This production usurps the right to drone.

-By T.E. Kalem