Mark’s Score: 3.5 stars
The title of Mark Langham’s play, recently shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights award, comes from an overheard compliment doled out by Joseph Stalin. Long before being the totalitarian he was to become, Stalin, in order to charm and surround himself with the younger thinkers of the party, curried favour with revolutionary golden boy Nicolai Ivanovich Bukharin. According to Yves Delbars’ 1953 biography, in the heady days just after the death of Lenin, Stalin cunningly positioned himself in social and political situations. Bukharin at age 35 was head of propaganda, a member of the Politburo and editor-in-chief of Pravda. On said occasion the decade older and less philosophically savvy Stalin ingratiatingly pronounced that “we are, (with you), the Himalayas of the Politburo, all others are just rubbish – excepting Trotsky”.
Within 15 years both Bukharin and Trotsky, once Stalin’s closest allies will be murdered during The Great Purge. Also known as the “Great Terror,” that brutal political campaign rampaged in order to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else considered a threat. Although estimates vary, most experts believe at least 750,000 people were executed during the period, while more than a million others were sent to forced labour camps, known as gulags. This ruthless and bloody operation impacted the country for many years even after deStalinization in the mid – late 1950s.
It is with Anna Larina (Charlotte Chimes), the second wife of Nikolai Bukharin (Ben Mathews), that Langham’s sets his play. Anna idolised her much older husband, but by association found herself spending 20 years in various remote internment camps. By the late 1950s she was released and spent the next 40 years reclaiming her husband’s reputation as one of the great minds of The Russian Revolution and co-creator of a functioning communistic system. Though imprisoned himself and undermined by Stalin via 
the infamous Moscow show trials of the late 1930s he appeared to remain loyal to the system. One of his final works How It All Began: The Prison Novel has within it sentiments of resolve and a prediction perhaps of what would become of the USSR 50 years after his death:
But to everything in this world there comes an end; there even comes an end to the torments suffered in those intermediate states of transition when the last secret tear of one’s soul is bitterly swallowed, and the crisis passes, resolving itself into some new sort of phase, which even as it comes into existence is fated in turn to pass away, to disappear in the eternal changing of the times and seasons. Bukharin 1937- 38.
We Are The Himalayas premieres in a production assuredly directed by Richard Cornally in the small intimate space that was once the World Bar’s Blood Moon Theatre. Something of an echo chamber I found the pitch of some of the vocal work by the company too strong for the space. However it does enhance the very immaculate sound design by Patrick Howard. The tapping on the waterpipes – a form of communication with others for Anna and her cellmates (Chelsea Klein and Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou) has a desperation in its 
reverberations, his use of a pulsing breathy sound somewhere off stage adds an indiscernible threat to the isolation these women suffer. The outside world is represented by the factual characters Lavrenty Beria (Steve Corner) and Ilya Ehrenberg (James Gordon). Corner captures extremely well the insidiousness of a man who need not answer to anyone, being one of Stalin’s chief henchmen. Gordon as the favoured Soviet writer and historian of the day depicts a man who must support the regime’s actions no matter what.
If you love your history and the machinations of fallacies and fake news then this is a play for you. It IS a wordy static piece that can test you at times, but the character dynamics are riveting.
Mark G Nagel – Theatre Now
We Are the Himalayas
Mark Langham
3 – 21 July 2019
Wednesday – Saturday 7:30pm
Sunday 5:30pm.
Venue: Fringe HQ Artist Hub
26 Bayswater Road, Potts Point
Theatre Company: Brave New Word Theatre Company
Duration: N/A
“I know you’re scared. You damn well should be… this place is dreadful.”
Anna Larina was known and renowned as the wife of one of the architects of the Russian Revolution, Nikolai Bukharin. With his downfall and execution, she was persecuted for twenty years, separated from her family, and spent her prime years in a succession of gulags.
Witnessing both the rise of the Revolution, and purges it conducted, she lived both sides of the hypocrisy of Stalin’s rule. She was loved as the partner of the golden child of the Revolution, and then condemned as the partner of a traitor. Through her, we see the very human cost of ideology, and the unimaginable triumph of the human spirit in the face of the hellish machine determined to subdue it.
The extraordinary story of Anna Larina. Punished for being a wife.
CAST:
Charlotte Chimes, Ben Matthews, Steve Corner, Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou, Chelsea Hamre, James Gordon
Written by: Mark Langham
Directed by:Richard Cornally
Production Design:Damien Egan
Lighting Design: Sophie Pekbilimli
Sound Design: Patrick Howard
Producer: Luke Holmes
Ticket Prices
Full $30
Concessions $25
Cheap Wed & Previews $22
