Theatre review: Cold War

Well it was snowing as I made my way to the Almeida, and that fits one of the meanings of Conor McPherson (book) and Elvis Costello's (music) Cold War, whose characters are often to be found shivering in big coats. Another is the more familiar meaning of the term, as the doomed love story is adapted from Paweł Pawlikowski's film set over the first couple of decades of Russian-occupied Poland. Beginning in 1949, Wiktor (Luke Thallon) is a composer who's part of a team led by Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey,) who are going around Poland collecting traditional folk songs. Previously dismissed as insignificant peasant music, their connection to people working the land makes them ideal to be co-opted by the Communists as stirring anthems. Wiktor is there to help make new arrangements that fit the themes of industry and productivity, for a show that'll be toured around Poland and eventually the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

Zula (Anya Chalotra) is a young woman with a reputation as a troublemaker, who nonetheless makes her way into the company, soon becoming its most recognisable face.

She and Wiktor fall for each other, but he has a shadow over him because of certain murky things he might have done during the War, and with his ex-girlfriend Irena (Alex Young) being disappeared when she lets some less-than-100% Polish music into the show, they're aware their life there together might not be sustainable. They plan to defect when the tour reaches East Berlin and meet again in the West, but at the last minute Kaczmarek convinces Zula to stay behind.

They eventually meet again when Wiktor is living in Paris and Zula gets dual citizenship for marrying an Italian, and they collaborate on music again, but their relationship never seems to work without vast geopolitical obstacles to overcome, and they're both drawn back in a fatalistic way to Poland despite the dangers it presents to them. The show weaves both traditional Polish folk songs and Costello's new compositions, creating quite a low-key but gently affecting musical that matches the relationship at its heart: The two never feel like a love affair for the ages and seem to irritate each other more than they attract each other but maybe that's the point.

Rupert Goold’s production has a few very stirring moments: Inasmuch as there’s such a thing as a joke in the show, there’s a running one about how the lyrics Wiktor’s French ex-lover (Anastasia Martin) wrote are gibberish, but regardless when Chalotra performs the resulting song it’s the most powerful musical moment of the evening. She and the ensemble take on the bulk of the singing, but Thallon can also carry a tune when required, and the rare moments when the pair duet are those that most build chemistry between them.

But elsewhere I wondered if the central love-hate relationship that seemed to be more hate than love was as much a commentary on life under an authoritarian regime as anything else in the play: If there’s anything we learn about the repressed Wiktor it’s that he’s got a self-loathing, self-destructive streak, and we find out the specific reasons for his guilt complex as the evening goes on. But do he and Zula also believe on some level that a relationship that runs smoothly isn’t something they deserve, or something worth having? Cold War ends up an indefinable show that leaves you wondering quite what you spent the last three hours on, watchable if never entirely gripping, atmospheric, tragic but never traditionally convincing in its central love story.

Cold War by Conor McPherson and Elvis Costello, based on the film by Paweł Pawlikowski, is booking until the 27th of January at the Almeida Theatre (returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.