There’s cold weather, alcohol and fights, but that’s about as Christmassy as this exquisitely sad love story between two Poles adrift in postwar Europe gets.
It’s been adapted sensitively by Conor McPherson from Pawel Pawlikowski’s award-winning 2018 film, the folk music of the original augmented with new and existing songs by Elvis Costello. But to call it a musical would somehow denigrate the atmospheric mournfulness of Rupert Goold’s production, strongly led by Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon.
It begins with composer-conductor Wiktor (Thallon) and his choreographer partner Irena (Alex Young) tabulating folksongs and dances in rural Poland. They, along with coarse Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey) are producing a touring show to preserve national pride in a country invaded by Nazis and now under Soviet sway. Then Wiktor clocks sultry, sullen, powerfully melodious Zula (Chalotra).
The heat of this new passion cools when the orchestra is pressed to perform new songs in praise of Stalin and agricultural machinery across the Warsaw Pact countries, and a mood of paranoia deepens. On a visit to Berlin, Wiktor defects but Zula is prevented by the watchful and adoring Kaczmarek. When the couple reunite in Paris years later and try to restart their romance and their shared musical ambitions, they realise they can’t live in or out of Poland, or each other’s company.
After the lusty burst at the start we hear snippets of the folk tunes Wiktor has adapted for Zula in Paris alongside Costello’s simple, plaintive compositions. The songs punctuate rather than dominate, accentuating emotion rather than carrying it. McPherson sometimes makes explicit what’s implied in Pawlikowski’s film, particularly regarding Wiktor’s wartime shame, but the script has the understated pathos that characterizes much of his finest works. Goold makes us feel the years of degradation behind the doomed love story.
Levey plays Kaczmarek as a faux-ebullient cockney fixer, while Chalotra’s character is all Midlands-accented anger – Zula once stabbed her abusive dad – except when deploying a lovely, crystalline singing voice. Thallon gets to sing less, but his modulated bourgeois diffidence is perfectly suited to Warsaw boy Wiktor’s apathetic self-loathing. Sometimes, here, you want to shake the character. Zula is full of active energy, Wiktor mostly passive.
Goold’s production is vividly designed, embracing bright peasant garb and left-bank boho chic, Iron Curtain apparatchik offices and smoky, spotlit clubs. Choreographer Ellen Kane gives us windmilling rural dances, a spiritedly drunken jive to Rock Around the Clock, and a take on the famous Madison routine from Jean-Luc Godard’s Band a part. I didn’t have any of this on my dance card for theatre in December, but Cold War is a brilliantly bitter antidote to standard Christmas fare.
