Review: Holy Fool (Park Theatre)

Review by Angelina Nield 

⭐️⭐️

Dmitri Shostakovich lives a delicate balance on the knife edge of Soviet-era USSR as both a celebrated composer and an enemy of the state. Torn between creating ‘honest art in a culture of lies’ and making painful compromises to put food on his family’s table, Shostakovich’s life is overflowing with detail ripe for the stage, but unfortunately Holy Fool never quite reaches its crescendo.

Spanning almost four decades in just over two hours, writers Rosalind Adler and Lea Sellers take us on an overly ambitious whistle-stop tour weaving chronologically through the artist’s complex life story. Unfortunately, by trying to cram in so much, Holy Fool is left feeling extremely disjointed and lacks any connection between one moment and the next. Similarly, rather than giving the opportunity to become fully immersed, Kate Fahy’s direction comes with constant blackouts and a frustrating amount of time jumps that only serve to pull the audience away from really grasping at the conflicts at play. 

Another personal gripe with this production is the reliance on telling rather than showing. The frequent scene changes are accompanied by extensive use of unidentifiable voiceovers that do little other than reinforce the previous scenes. Lines about the opening performance being ‘make or break’ or the reinforcement that Mitya is constantly ‘walking on eggshells’ under Stalin’s reign of terror come across as far too on the nose, especially when combined with the spoon-feeding of each scenes’ time period and location broadcast on the screen backdrop. 

Set designer William Fricker has clearly gone to great efforts in sourcing a baby grand piano as a centrepiece, buried under piles of books and papers and surrounding by the furnishings of a Soviet-era apartment. However, this doesn’t always fit the action taking place, for example we begin backstage before a premier, yet we’re already in a living room. Additionally, the Shostakovich family appear to move two or three times, yet the setting remains almost the same. Fricker’s vision truly comes to life once the story reaches the final quarter and shows that combining digital displays and swapping out the furniture near entirely shows what could this production could be capable of. 

Benjamin O’Mahony plays Dmitri ‘Mitya’ Shostakovich with a calm and level-headed demeanour encapsulated in horn-rimmed glasses and sharply pressed suits throughout. This characterisation, which may well be accurate, puts the audience at such a distance that we never really get a feel for how the toll of attempting to appease Stalin whilst maintaining artistic liberty is affecting him. Jenna Augen plays his sharp and witty wife Nina, with a plethora of quips and stark honesty to serve up a believable internal conflict and create a sense of jeopardy which is notably absent elsewhere. 

Fergus O’Donnell and Phoebe Price complete the casting as close friend Izaak and aspiring young musician Katya respectively, alongside numerous other roles. Both actors do their best with the paper-thin character development afforded to them, especially as both characters seem to pop in and out of the piece at seemingly random intervals. Pryce’s fantastically fiery return at the end for an ill-fitting drawn-out fictional subplot about a now adult Katya forcing Mitya to confront his alleged cowardice following Stalin’s death is entirely wasted due to the lack of jeopardy or conflict built in the prior two hours. Subsequently, far too much of Act Two is spent developing a friendship that makes no connection with the audience because there’s no backstory developed beforehand.

Holy Fool is not without its high notes, and there is some genuine potential shining through, however in its current form remains largely forgettable, a shame given what the bones of a much stronger final product might have been. To quote one of my fellow audience members- Shostakovich’s music should present itself as a secret code, only to find itself cracked by the very people who want the solutions destroyed, yet this pianist play sadly falters without crescendo.

Holy Fool plays at Park Theatre until 10^th October. Tickets from https://allthatdazzles.londontheatredirect.com/play/holy-fool-tickets

Photos by Mark Douet