Theatre
Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha, Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
THREE STARS
Sasha is already dead when we look in on his family. However, in this play by Ukrainian writer Natalia Vorozhbyt (translated by Sasha Dugdale and directed by Nicola McCartney), he's not exactly gone. His presence - a pyjama'd Paul Cunningham - is still lingering while wife Katya and heavily pregnant stepdaughter Oksana prepare his funeral food, bicker about his good and bad points, and keep forgetting he's no longer there to take the rubbish out.
It seems that was Sasha's main contribution to the running of their Kiev home. Even as she bewails his loss, Katya (Jill Riddiford) can't help but revert to her usual sniping: she's dismissive about his Army career as a colonel in peace-time, reiterates how her own hard work and business acumen has supported them all. You sense what she'll really miss is having him on hand for verbal target practice - not that the readily-tearful Oksana (Jenny Hulse) escapes reproach. Her baby's due, there's no father and now no grandfather either. No man to shoulder any of life's burdens.
If the sharp barbs and pithy comedy in the dialogue fly a flag for women-power, there's a twist that is unexpectedly moving, not least because it touches on the current state of affairs between Ukraine and Russia. While memories of Sasha haunt the living, Sasha himself is haunted in the after-life by how his wife really wore the trousers: he and his dead comrades will mobilise to defend their country, their women-folk... Fantastical yes, but there's a poignant humanity in Sasha's yen to fight and protect a wife who is already coping briskly with the reality of war. And in Katya's preparations, we too are confronted by realities all-too present in the writer's homeland.
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