Cold War – Almeida Theatre

Picture: Marc Brenner

Cold War continues at the Almeida Theatre, London until 30 January 2024.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

For a venue’s big Christmas show, it’s traditional for a venue to go for something crowd-pleasing, optimistic, something to add sparkle to the drab winter evenings. So it’s a bold choice by the Almeida to go against the flow and instead bring a drab, overlong dirge of a half-musical instead.

Based on Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 film and directed by Rupert Goold, the story charts the on-off relationship between feisty, troubled singer Zula (Anya Chalotra) and Luke Thallon’s composer Wiktor in the years after the Second World War. The couple meet as Wiktor, along with Alex Young’s Irena and their boss Kaczmarek (a scenery-chewing Elliot Levey) are collating folk music from around Poland with the aim of creating a concert celebrating the country’s identity after liberation from Nazi control.

As the concert develops, the Communist government starts to impose its own purpose on the team’s work, querying the inclusion of any music from the Lemko ethnic minority, and pushing for lyrics that celebration the government’s policies and allegiances to Stalin’s Russia. This setting allows for copious use of Polish folk music, often performed by Jo Cichonska’s four-piece band and with some great traditional dance sequences. Ellen Kane’s choreography brings out the spectacle of the country’s folk dances nicely.

As the play progresses, we get some original songs, written by Elvis Costello. In line with Wiktor’s work of adapting traditional folk melodies for modern sensibilities, Costello’s work similarly hues closely to the styles of music we are first introduced to. However, this does mean that there is often a lack of variety, with nothing to lift the heart out of the gloom of Jon Bauser’s set design and Evie Gurney’s similarly monochromatic costumes.

Wiktor’s eventual defection to the West promises more light to go with the shade as his story moves to Paris, where he finds work as a composer for French films. But still there is a perpetual air of melancholy, first as the composer misses Zula (who did not manage to escape with him), then as they reunite and realise that they make each other miserable.

There are moments of levity and happiness, particularly in some of the Parisian rock‘n’roll sequences as Billy Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ makes an appearance. Throughout also, the flashes of passionate joy that Wiktor and Zula occasionally share offer glimmers of potential. Thallon in particular is able to elicit warmth with just a smile and a twinkle of an eye.

But even that becomes subsumed in the unremitting gloom. Conor McPherson’s script has little interest in exploring what attracts Wiktor and Zula to one another, or exactly how Zula’s use as a propaganda agent of the state is a contributory factor to her emotional decline. 
Nor does it ever really explore Poland’s sublimation into the USSR or its gradual release from Stalin’s grasp. At times it feels like Wiktor and Zula’s differing relationships with Levey’s Kaczmarek act as metaphors with the people’s relationship to their homeland, or to Poland’s relationship with the West and the USSR; but no metaphor truly works. At one point, Wiktor’s then-girlfriend Juliette (Anastasia Martin) composes a poem full of clumsy metaphors which the composer sets to music. Zula’s demolition of the lyrics, and the writer’s half-hearted justification of the same, feel like they could be about the show as a whole.

As it is, Cold War feels neither like a play with music, nor a musical (it has been described as both at various points). The ends of both acts conclude in more musical-style ensemble numbers where characters sing of their inner thoughts; elsewhere the music is diegetic and almost incidental. Together with an almost criminal underuse of Young, it feels as if this is a play that resents its near-musical status.

And as with the rest of the nihilistic tone of the piece, it feels hard to care about anything, or anyone, throughout. If there was a Polish word for ennui, it would be the perfect encapsulation of Cold War.

Scott Matthewman