"What did you do in the war, Daddy?" is a question that has never much mattered in the UK - almost everyone involved (except Oswald Mosely) can give an account of heroism of one kind or another, as right fought wrong and right prevailed. As the men and women of whom one can ask such a question succumb to old age, and new, different wars bubble and blaze, it would be easy to consider the question a dead letter, but in many parts of the world, some frequented by stag and hen parties, the matter of what one did in the war is very much alive and fuels politics today.
Aleksey Scherbak's Remembrance Day (translated by Rory Mullarkey) is set in modern Latvia, and pits husband against wife, daughter against father, Latvian against Russian and ambition against action, all in the name of who did what to whom and why a yawning three score years and ten ago. As explained (rather late in the play for those perhaps not entirely au fait with Baltic history), little Latvia was during World War II, and not for the first time, a political football kicked about between warring imperial powers - firstly under the Nazi jackboot, then under the Russian hammer. Such history lives and breathes even today, with few Baltic ethnic Germans left in the region, but half a million ethnic Russians amongst the nation's two million population and Russian language and culture all around.
In adjacent flats, old soldiers and Nazi collaborators Valdis (Ewan Hooper) and Paulis (Sam Kelly) bicker over whether it is right, even now, to hate the Russians; while next door, teenage firebrand Anya (Ruby Bentall) has the same argument with her father (Michael Nardone) over whether it is right to hate the Nazis (specifically, Latvians like Valdis and Paulis who fought alongside Nazis). On one set, lit alternatively for the two flats in which most of the action takes place, Anya and Valdis, though at different ends of the political, age and gender spectrums, are revealed as similarly imprisoned in a set of attitudes impervious to change and ultimately, inevitably, leading to their own demises, the one through stress-induced coronary, the other through a destructive act of violence. Between them range the other characters, all of whom understand the extremists and sympathise with one or other to some extent, but these men and women are less hung up on the past, more interested in a future free of parochial squabbling (Lyosha, Anya's brother) or in personal political advancement (Boris, Anya's lover).
Scherbak's script occasionally falls into speechifying, rather than conversation, and he is lucky that Hooper and Kelly are such old pros that they can squeeze plenty of laughs out of the old collaborating curmudgeons' reminisences, because the play needs some light amidst all that shade cast over its 90 minutes of intense arguing. Michael Longhurst's direction requires a lot of lights going on and off and doors being opened and closed, but the key questions do come through as Scherbak intended. As for the answers? Well, there's precious little illumination on that score, as the lights go up one last time on the theatre as a whole.
Remembrance Day is at The Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs until 16 April 2011.
