Theatre review: Ivan and the Dogs

The annual JMK award seems to have moved venues but the Young Vic has still hung on to the other directors’ bursary that’s showcased a couple of times a year in its smallest space: The latest Genesis Future Directors Award sees Caitriona Shoobridge direct Hattie Naylor’s 2010 monologue Ivan and the Dogs, based on a true story from Russia’s catastrophic financial collapse in the late 1990s, when even very young children were homeless and roaming the streets of Moscow on their own. Starting from the present day, Ivan (Alex Austin) flashes back to when he was four years old and kept overhearing his abusive stepfather telling his mother they’d have to put the child out on the streets because they could no longer afford to feed both him and themselves. Deciding to jump before he’s pushed, Ivan runs away to the other side of the city; but the glue-sniffing street kids frighten him too much for him to join one of their gangs.

Instead he finds a very different pack to run with when he gives some food to a large white dog and she allows him to follow her back to her hiding spot. He sets himself up nearby and although she never allows him into the den she shares with four other dogs, he increasingly becomes considered part of their pack.

Based near a factory, they survive two winters mainly by stealing the workers’ leftover lunches from the bins, as well as getting handouts from the odd restaurant worker they trust not to turn them in to the militia. A story about child homelessness is inevitably a bleak and brutal one but while there are passages that are hard to hear Naylor has focused instead on Ivan’s resilience and the extraordinary connection that builds up between him and the dogs. The humans come off less well than the animals – Ivan beginning to identify himself as a dog isn’t just a product of him staying with the pack for so long but also a deliberate distancing from a species he sees as inherently cruel, and Austin has a kind of awkward physicality that increasingly works towards an animalistic otherness.

Basia Bińkowska’s in-the-round design has an industrial feel, perhaps inspired by the factory where the pack makes their home, and places Ivan on a raised central grill. For the rare interactions with humans, Austin turns to face pre-recorded voices in Russian which come from behind the audience, not welcome in the story’s inner circle. Ivan and the Dogs ultimately finds a hope that humanity isn’t entirely worthless, but it’s definitely the dogs that end up with the moral high ground.

Ivan and the Dogs by Hattie Naylor is booking until the 20th of July at the Young Vic’s Clare.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Anthony Lee.