Kursk play opens at the Young Vic, London
Theatre is capable of taking its audience more or less anywhere merely through word and action and the odd prop. Even for the most imagination-stretching of art forms, however, life on board a submarine might be deemed a bridge too far. It’s been memorably done on film — the one that submariners all swear by is Das Boot rather than The Hunt for Red October. But how can theatre fully convey the cabin fever, the mental bends, the chronic uncertainty of the submerged life at sea?
Audiences for a new play at the Young Vic will be taking what is perhaps the first, and certainly the most realistic, theatrical dive to the ocean depths. Kursk takes place in the Maria, the box-like studio space where, as closely as possible, the interior of a hunter-killer submarine has been replicated in pipes, platforms, wires and blinking lights. Authenticity will be conveyed above all in the disembodied roar and hiss, growls and grunts both made and heard by the gigantic listening device that is a sub.
The title of the play gives at least some of the story away. It tells of the horrific death in 2000 of 118 Russian seamen aboard a stricken nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. The majority of them died soon after an on-board explosion, but 23 survived in an airtight part of the cabin for several days while President Putin refused to let Nato come to the rescue.
The argument of the play is that Nato was very much in a position to help. The Russian Navy was testing new weapons systems and showing them off to the Chinese. At least two US submarines are known to have been watching closely. The supposition of Kursk is that a British submarine is also in the neighbourhood, and it is the one that picks up the aural evidence of distress. But as its commander of this sub (on which the play is set) says: “We’re an attack vessel, not a f***ing lifeboat.”
Kursk is a collaboration between the theatre company Sound & Fury, which specialises in surround-sound designs of cinematic scope, and the playwright Bryony Lavery. They were first teamed four years ago by a funding initiative that pairs young companies with established writers. Staging a submarine drama appealed to all. For Lavery the lure was “the claustrophobia of the space”. For Dan Jones, of Sound & Fury, it was putting on stage “the extraordinary mind game of submarining combined with the absurdity of the submariner’s domestic life: making tea alongside a nuclear reactor”.
For a while they toyed with setting the drama on the Kursk itself. The most bizarre ideas for realising the human tragedy were tested and discarded: the Kursk as a nightmare vision of Chekhovian stasis; the disaster as dramatised by clowns. “It became clear that normal life at sea is so extraordinary,” explains Mark Espiner, of Sound & Fury, “that we were going to miss a trick if we didn’t actually use that as a benchmark against which to set the disaster. There was the potential for voyeurism. Also, how are you ever actually going to get the idea of what the last 23 survivors of the Kursk were dealing with?”..
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Audiences for a new play at the Young Vic will be taking what is perhaps the first, and certainly the most realistic, theatrical dive to the ocean depths. Kursk takes place in the Maria, the box-like studio space where, as closely as possible, the interior of a hunter-killer submarine has been replicated in pipes, platforms, wires and blinking lights. Authenticity will be conveyed above all in the disembodied roar and hiss, growls and grunts both made and heard by the gigantic listening device that is a sub.
The title of the play gives at least some of the story away. It tells of the horrific death in 2000 of 118 Russian seamen aboard a stricken nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. The majority of them died soon after an on-board explosion, but 23 survived in an airtight part of the cabin for several days while President Putin refused to let Nato come to the rescue.
The argument of the play is that Nato was very much in a position to help. The Russian Navy was testing new weapons systems and showing them off to the Chinese. At least two US submarines are known to have been watching closely. The supposition of Kursk is that a British submarine is also in the neighbourhood, and it is the one that picks up the aural evidence of distress. But as its commander of this sub (on which the play is set) says: “We’re an attack vessel, not a f***ing lifeboat.”
Kursk is a collaboration between the theatre company Sound & Fury, which specialises in surround-sound designs of cinematic scope, and the playwright Bryony Lavery. They were first teamed four years ago by a funding initiative that pairs young companies with established writers. Staging a submarine drama appealed to all. For Lavery the lure was “the claustrophobia of the space”. For Dan Jones, of Sound & Fury, it was putting on stage “the extraordinary mind game of submarining combined with the absurdity of the submariner’s domestic life: making tea alongside a nuclear reactor”.
For a while they toyed with setting the drama on the Kursk itself. The most bizarre ideas for realising the human tragedy were tested and discarded: the Kursk as a nightmare vision of Chekhovian stasis; the disaster as dramatised by clowns. “It became clear that normal life at sea is so extraordinary,” explains Mark Espiner, of Sound & Fury, “that we were going to miss a trick if we didn’t actually use that as a benchmark against which to set the disaster. There was the potential for voyeurism. Also, how are you ever actually going to get the idea of what the last 23 survivors of the Kursk were dealing with?”..