Shukshin's Stories: a 'gypsy boy-with-trane' painting by a grand master. #hf10

The Russian soul. So there is something about that. And you get something from that when you see a Chekhov play (if done well), or read one of his short stories. Or when you read the works of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky or any other inhabitant of that vast nothingness east of Poland. Or seeing the paintings that a few years ago enveloped the Groninger Museum in chilly melancholy.

Jelle Brandt Corstius (jellebc for his followers on twitter) had also been touched by it, and in two legendary documentary series shared with us his love-hate relationship with this continent full of drunks, depressed soldiers and gorgeous but unruly and therefore lonely women.

This was all before we could have learned about Schukshin's Stories, the Russian theatre production that is now, briefly, far too briefly, visiting the Netherlands as part of the Holland Festival.

No one but a Russian, or in this case a native of Latvia who lived through the Soviet era, can make us feel what that is, that Russian soul. Latvian director Alvis Hermanis took Vasily Shukshin's stories and turned them into theatre. Now those stories were already legendary in the time of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and so we are talking about the heyday of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s. All the more remarkable to note descriptions of rural life that are more critical of the government than would be accepted in Russia today. Shukshin, himself a theatre-maker and film director, described life in the village of his youth in his stories, leading to atmospheric descriptions dripping with loving sentiment, without drawing tears like Wim Sonneveld's now cliché song 'The Village', with that garden path and those tall trees. Shukshin can perhaps be compared to the Frisian Bouke Oldenhof, who in a number of short plays (including Rolbrug) described life in the dying Frisian hamlet where he inhabits an old café. So Shukshin's is a description that comes so deeply from within the community that distancing himself actually becomes impossible, even for readers, and now spectators, of his work.

Eight portraits of sad village heroes pass by in the show that lasts barely three hours. Some more sad than others, and they all fail. But because everyone around them knows that failure is part of life, it doesn't matter, and that gives that rural sadness of Shukshin's stories an inimitable lightness. The beautiful actors begin the performance almost like a slapstick, wearing oversized jackets on a bare stage, on which the image is defined by giant prints of photographs of the surroundings and the inhabitants of Shukshin's village, where neither garden path nor tall tree can be found. And before this stark but detached-humorous design gets the upper hand and it degenerates into an evening of peasant-bashing, the acting style softens. The portraits become more intimate, the big city joins in as an equally sad abode, and so we end up with a clueless convict who escapes from prison three months before his release to be back with his hopelessly living family in the sad village. The villain is caught again and we are left with the indescribable grief of his deaf-mute sister, played heartbreakingly by Chulpan Khamatova, an actress who appears capable of the most matchless transformations I have ever seen.

And so with that heartbreaking deaf-mute girl, director Alvis Hermanis shows he has masterful skills. Because it is a smartlap story, and the ending is also a smartlap, but nowhere does it become cheap, nowhere does it get boring or cliché. You don't feel cheated for a moment, as happens with cheap smartlaps. This is a 'gypsy boy-with-trane' painting by a grand master.

And where does that lead? To tears. And in such an insurmountable torrent that your reporter didn't know how quickly he had to rush out into the fresh air after the thunderous applause. Before the crying fit became truly embarrassing.

The play can still be seen on Sunday 20 and Monday 21 June. You know what to do.