For those who love music and the place where music intersects with drama and dance, there’s real treat of a play which I hope is coming to London soon. The Gates of Kyiv is about so many things that a summary feels more than usually slight. But the short version is that this new work tells the many-layered story of the friendship between the great pianist, Maria Yudina, and the composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. It is written by Ian Kelly – a historical biographer as well as a playwright whose last play, Mr Foote’s Other Leg, starred Simon Russell Beale. The show has very different concerns and compass to Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, but there’s a cousin invitation to understand and experience the life of the artists both as lived and as reflected upon by one of them – in this case Shostakovich. What drew me to the play in Windsor, though, was the promise of live music and the question of how to marry live classical repertoire to drama, without the one being deleterious to the other.
The story itself is fascinating. Yudina was an extraordinary woman and one of the truly brilliant pianists of her age. Born into a Jewish family in 1899, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy aged 20, and refused to conform to Soviet ideologies, remaining outspoken in her religious beliefs and defiant in the championing of the music she wished to perform, regardless of whether or not it had regime approval. Legends surround her. Those concerning the intensity and virtuosity of her performances. Those concerning the rich intellectual life of which she was part – besides Shostakovich, she was friends with the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and poet Boris Pasternak. Those concerning her crippling poverty as her dissidence took its toll. And those concerning her fierce and recalcitrant relationship with Stalin himself – which the play imagines, confronts and enacts.
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