“I love complicated stories. My role model is Chekhov. His characters are also incredibly multi-layered.” Director and writer Evgeniya Rudyuk was responding to comments from the audience during the post-performance discussion following “Queer Quark” at CC Amstel. The mission was a success. Her nameless protagonist, played by Natalia Perel, tells a story, part of which she then denies at the end. This leaves the audience in a state of confusion. Very Russian, it turns out.
The title of this performance, *Queer Quark*, does not necessarily refer to the ‘queerness’ expressed during Pride events, but it does draw on it. According to the writer, her ‘queer quark’ is a ghost particle from quantum physics, elusive and not fitting into the Standard Model. So that was also Pavel Kushnir, the pianist and poet from Birobidzhan, who spoke out against the war in Ukraine and paid the price with an unmarked grave in a mass grave near the detention centre where, according to the authorities, he died following a hunger strike. Being gay, Jewish and anti-war – that’s all it takes to die in Russia.
Political prisoners
A play staged as a protest against the murder of political prisoners: that’s the sort of thing we’re happy to go to the theatre for. But for us, as residents of a free country, it’s also a bit of a cop-out. That’s what you realise when you go to see a play created by a whole team of Russian women who, for various reasons, have left the country they long for and/or abhor.
Just as the three sisters in Chekhov’s play of the same name long for Moscow, the narrator in *Queer Quark* yearns for Birobidzhan. And that is complicated from the outset, because there is little to like about this city in the Far East of Russia, the capital of a Jewish state created by Stalin. The team includes women who have sometimes fled, and others who have remained in the Netherlands, feeling somewhat displaced, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Natalia Perel explained that her situation was even more complicated. As a Jew who had been oppressed in Russia, who had fled, and who was then condemned here as a Russian because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “And then came 7 October…”. Talk about complications.
Complications
That, combined with the fact that family members left behind also need to be protected, means that the dialogue with the public is not as open and honest as we might hope.
It turned out to be a complicated evening, with a play that could still do with some improvement if it were also performed in Russian or Yiddish, with surtitles. Perhaps it would then become even more complicated, but if this performance – followed by a post-show discussion – makes one thing clear, it is that you can only tackle a complicated reality with complicated art.
And that’s why you need a non-commercial festival like Amsterdam Fringe to see a production like this, one that isn’t quite ready for the mainstream circuit. Because it teaches you that ‘the stranger’ is always worth the effort.
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