The power of the spoken word

Victoria Laurie- The AUSTRALIAN

The Ships Pass Quietly
By John Aitken. Prickly Pear Ensemble. Blue Room, Perth, July 20. Tickets: $20. Bookings: (08) 9227 7005. Until August 5.

THIS new play is a portrait of the Russian lyric poet, Anna Akhmatova. It is a beautifully realised account of a fascinating woman for whom poetry was sustenance throughout her hard life. Fittingly, playwright John Aitken has chosen to make the power of words its central theme.

We meet an elderly Anna and her faithful friend Lydia in the poet's sparse Soviet flat in the early 1950s, years after she wrote her most powerful poems. Their power lingers: Stalin has banned her writing because it describes the suffering of Russian people under his rule. Akhmatova's husband, also a poet, was executed by the Bolsheviks and her son imprisoned for nearly two decades until Stalin's death.

Her poem cycle Requiem was partly inspired by stoic women who, like her, waited in long lines outside the prison gate to deliver food to husbands and sons inside.

One woman recognised Akhmatova and asked, "Would you be able to describe this?"

Akhmatova's simple yes became a promise never to forget people's suffering.

Perth-based Aitken has written 30 stage plays and several for ABC radio. He tells the tale economically through dialogue between the two women. While Anna is indisputably the heroine, Aitken imbues Lydia with a gift for memorising the poet's lines that is almost as precious as the poetry itself.

Since Akhmatova's poems could not be published, they could only safely reside in the minds of friends such as Lydia who committed them to memory. The women's almost religious ritual of burning scraps of poetry is a stark emblem of the terrors of living in spy-ridden Stalinist Russia.

As Anna and Lydia, Vivienne Glance and Irene Jarzabek are perfect foils for each other. Tall, dark Glance carries off the image of Akhmatova as a haughty beauty with fierce intelligence; Jarzabek portrays the homely, faithful aide who gives a superb speech late in the play warning Anna not to write propaganda eulogising Stalin, not even to save her own son.

Lively dialogue is intertwined with poetry, and sheds light on the qualities that sustained Anna through her harrowing life. She clearly had a healthy ego; she observed that, like poet couple Robert and Elizabeth Browning, her own talent probably outshone that of her poet husband.

The only unconvincing scene is when a thuggish stranger (Craig Fong) breaks into Anna's flat and is apparently mesmerised by the poet's facility with words. Two minor roles -- Anna's cocky young husband and a Soviet agent -- both played by Ethan Tomas, nicely fill in the picture.

The emotional impact of this play is the determination of both Anna and her friend Lydia to keep faith with the woman in the prison line.

Aitken has written an eloquent tribute to both Akhmatova and poets as truthtellers.