Review: The Promise

The Promise
Belvoir Street Theatre
Until 23 August
Tickets $34-56
Bookings (02) 9699 3444
Critic’s Rating 7/10


Famously, the first English language production of The Promise was performed in 1967, starring Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Ian McShane. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more simmering trio to act out the lives of a love triangle set over twenty years in Soviet Russia.

Luckily, Simon Stone, in his mainstage directorial debut for Company B, has found another beautiful trio to tell the story of three teenage orphans who find themselves together during the 1942 siege of Leningrad.

In an empty apartment above a city surrounded by Nazis, Lika (Alison Bell) and Marat (Ewen Leslie) are with little food and hardly any warmth.

At 16, Lika has learnt life the hard way, waiting for her neighbours to starve to death before she steals their furniture to burn. But she has a love of Tolstoy and Tergenev and an innocent beauty with a smile that always speaks surprise.

Marat, on the other hand, is a little older, chiding her for the brutal way she waits for the death of those around her. But he is a chronic liar with a quick temper behind his dark eyes.

Their isolation together turns into passion and on Lika’s birthday they suddenly find themselves locking lips and falling headlong into love.

The final ingredient for the ménage a trois comes in the form of Leonidik (Chris Ryan), who enters and comes crashing to the floor overcome by fatigue and starvation. Always talking in the third person, he is a writer afraid of being read.

As the three become reliant on one another for companionship, this love story looks at the many ways we all have a need to love and be loved – despite what’s happening outside our own four walls.

Played out over three acts, The Promise takes us from the siege to the end of the war, when Leonidik and Marat return from army service and force Lika to choose between the two lovers. Act three hurls us forward to 1959, when the three are brought back together again and decisions about their future have to be made once more.

Quite simply, the language of this play by Russian writer Alexei Arbuzov, in a new adaptation by Nick Dear, is stunningly beautiful.

The director has delivered, on a bear revolving stage, a even-handed interpretation with some stunning photo-like images at the end of each scene that help find the intimacy and romance of these alluring characters.

However it’s a production that doesn’t quite simmer enough and hasn’t quite got its head around the brooding passion of these three very Russian characters. But give it a couple of weeks and that passion could very well simmer right to the top.