The Knight of the Burning Pestle dir. by Declan Donnellan (review)

The Knight of the Burning Pestleis a play about theater which satirizes the theatrical mores of its time. Staging the play in the modern day and in a loose Russian translation, Cheek by Jowl and the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theater brilliantly reimagined this seventeenth-century play as a culture clash between wildly divergent contemporary performance modes, as an onstage audience more at home in a West End musical continually interrupted and adapted an earnest, avant gardeproduction.

In the opening moments, the actors slouched on a series of artfully arranged chairs, most facing away from the white block on which a video stream was projected. It quickly became clear that this was a prologue to The London Merchant, the play the onstage audience would soon disrupt. The prologue, markedly different to the aborted opening of Beaumont's play, emphasized "the darker side of human nature" and was delivered by the production's Brecht-bespectacled director, later bathetically revealed to have the name Tim (Kirll Sbitnev). Using further video projections, Tim envisaged The London Merchantas a curious mashup of Brecht and Chekhov. Images projected on the white cube to suggest scene settings looked like nineteenth-century naturalist sets. The first scene, the house of Venturewell (Sergei Miller), was represented by the image of a woodpaneled drawing room rendered in a monochrome redolent of early photography. The austere, naturalist domestic backdrop was undercut by a range of stereotypically postmodern techniques: the black-clad cast, the video projection, and an array of ominous, discordant sound effects all made clear that the Chekhovian set was mere artifice. Tim's Brechtian style was itself completely at odds with the naturalist frame he apparently invoked.

The po-faced, pretentious production of The London Merchantwas in turn set against the populist demands of the Grocer (Alexander Feklistov) and the Grocer's Wife (Agrippina Steklova), who in one of the many interruptions revealed, via a telephone call, that they would have been at The Lion Kinghad it not been sold out. The couple repeatedly and loudly bemoaned the spectacle of "modern theater," although the lecherous Grocer became rather enamored with Luce (Anna Vardevanian), who at one stage pulled down her knickers to urinate in Waltham Forest, prompting the Grocer's Wife to acidly remark to her husband "So now you're an admirer of modern theater?" Later in the production, the Grocer got up on stage and chased Luce round the back of the stage with a video camera. The Grocer's Wife, for her part, was comically captivated by the actor playing Humphrey (Andrei Kuzichev), whom she recognized as a TV doctor (and, indeed, Kuzichev does play the role of a doctor in the Russian TV show It Will Return). Although The London Merchantwas performed in Russian, by a Russian cast, the Grocer's Wife was clearly aware she was in London and the production made several jokes about her stereotypical view of British culture, typified by her references to Brexit and David Beckham.

Tim and his cast tried their best to keep to their original plan, delivering a production that explored increasingly dark and unsettling themes. The forest was a dangerous place for Luce, who was almost assaulted twice, first by Humphrey and then by her lover, Jasper (Kirill Chernyshenko), whose threats, it transpired, were part of a grim test of her love. The forest, projected against the white cube in the manner of the first scene's wood-paneled chamber, was an eerie wilderness in which Mrs Merrythought (Anna Karmakova), a put-upon housewife...