It is hard to know [wrote the reviewer] whether or not Jameson, who ostensibly 'wrote' and 'directed' this appalling spectacle of theatre, has ever opened a history book concerning the subject matter of his play, or consulted an encyclopaedia, or indeed even a dictionary.
One wonders what possessed the man - whom, but for his very advanced age, might otherwise have been excused this cultural crime on account of youthful naivety - to pen a light-hearted comedy on the subject of the 1933 Ukrainian famine, in which up to 2 million people starved to death. It is known in that country as Holodomor, commonly rendered into English as "The Extermination by Famine", or to use Jameson's own translation - also the title of the play - "Hungry hungry Slavs". (Incidentally, both the promotional posters and the programme itself contained a misprint - one error, at very least, for which Jameson can presumably avoid blame - with the second "hungry" in the title spelt without an "r". Hungry hungy Slavs.)
In the same way that the agonies of starvation were surely a theme of sorts to the impoverished peasants of Kiev and Vennytsia in the early 1930s, so appalling slapstick is the abiding theme of Jameson's play. One memorable scene - not even, I regret to say, the most offensive - opens with protagonists Kasimir and Len by the roadside, mid-famine, each chewing on a lean, meaty drumstick. Kasimir takes a large bite, and then spits out his mouthful in disgust. "What is this, Len?" he demands to know, waving the dripping bone beneath his partner's nose. "Why Kasimir," replies Len, "it's only HP sauce!", and the script must have called for Len to pause at this moment for laughter, seven seconds which were met, in actuality, by a confused silence in the audience.
Confusion gave way quickly to horror as the 'punchline' was revealed: our heroes are in fact cannibalising the remains of their beloved friend Volodymyr, identifiable to the audience by his flat-cap, and whose death, whilst made doubly certain by his two hungry hungry friends, is never actually explained. The 'joke', I suppose, is that we - the audience - consider at first that Kasimir is disgusted to find he is eating a human (and his erstwhile companion no less) whereas in fact he is revolted by Len's choice of condiments. Comedy gold.
Nothing of the humour, I assure you, is lost in explanation. I suspect it was even less funny to witness it 'in the flesh', so to speak, and a lady in the row behind me actually vomited. The sight of her - pale and sweating, with stinking, half-digested mulch pooled in her lap, the remains of dinner - was nevertheless much more appealing than the sights on stage. In the interests of balance, I concede that Jameson's prop manager appears to know his business, for Volodymyr's jointed carcass was exceedingly realistic, right down to the stench of decay and teeth marks in the exposed white flank.
(In one of the more egregious of Jameson's scripting oversights, Volodymyr actually reappears in a later scene, joining Len and Kasimir on stage for a musical number about typhus and its deleterious effects on infant mortality ("Lice, lice, baby"). Is he real, or merely a spectral visitation? Either way, Kasimir and Len remain strangely calm in his presence, and if he sung a little badly - which he did - one can surely blame the fact his vocal chords were marinated in HP sauce and served as a kebab shortly beforehand.)
To describe this play as having low points would necessarily imply one or more downward trajectories, beginning at a relative high point. The fact is that it begins at rock bottom, with a clumsy gag about 'chicken kiev', and remains there until the end, some two hours later, with Kasimir's falsetto lament by the marshy banks of the Neman ("Crimea river").
For all its historical inaccuracies (Len possesses a fax machine, for example, some thirty years before they became commercially widespread) and geographical blunders (the River Neman flows through Belarus and Lithuania, not Ukraine, and certainly not the Crimean peninsula), one can at least say this is not Jameson's most poorly-researched work. Vying for that accolade must surely be his thought-provoking "Gay Gandhi", subject to an ongoing law-suit, and last year's "Abraham's Thinkin'", in which the assassination of President Lincoln by British Redcoats is depicted as having sparked the American Civil War...
The review continued in that same, uncharitable vein for a further half page. Why the Merton Gazette had seen fit to devote an entire pullout feature of their Sunday edition to poor reviews of his play, Mr Peter Reginald Jameson could not understand. It seemed unusually vindictive. Even the amateurish "hate rallies" of the local jihadist cell, the South Wimbledon Martyrs, received fewer column inches.
("The Merton Martyrs", snappy and alliterative, would perhaps have been a better name for the gang, and much more accurate given their headquarters were the above the opticians on Merton High Street. Then again, few of us are entirely innocent of engaging in a little post-code snobbery from time to time; one can devote oneself to promoting violent jihad and the downfall of Western Imperialism, but still want to appear closer to Wimbledon than Colliers Wood.)
The play, Hungry hungry Slavs, had opened on the previous Thursday evening in the main hall of the Downley Road community centre, to an audience of four people. Given the pullout contained no fewer than six reviews, noted Peter, ever sharp-eyed, with all six referring to the opening show, that meant at least two reviews had come from the cast and crew themselves. Alas, the cowardly pen-wielding assassins had elected to remain anonymous - that is, except for the Gazette's official theatre critic, the venomous Clarice Arthur.
Clarice and Peter were arch nemeses. Or at least, that is how Peter Jameson contemplated their arrangement. If truth be told, Clarice had little idea who Peter was. She thought, eying him from fifteen feet away during his somewhat audacious curtain call at the play's conclusion, that she recognised him. "Perhaps he's the council worker who picks up our recycling on Tuesdays," she said to herself.
But Peter was no council worker. In fact, he and the local council were sworn enemies (again, only in Peter's mind). He had recently canvased the neighbourhood to raise awareness of council inaction over "The Fox Question". The Fox Question, or "FTQ" as Peter sometimes called it, was the stirring quandary posed by the recent influx of vulpes vulpes, or "vulpes urbanus" as Peter sometimes referred to the creatures in his pamphlet. It was his view that the recent spike in numbers was no coincidence, but in fact had been deliberately engineered by some nefarious council committee in order to build support for the area's regeneration, support without which they could not access the requisite government grant. Peter Jameson liked the neighbourhood the way it was, and didn't want to see it gentrified. "Today it's a road without potholes," he liked to tell cashiers in the newsagent, "tomorrow they'll be bulldozing our community centre to build a McStarbucks outlet."
How had the council engineered the influx? Simply, claimed Peter, by moving the bin collection day from Monday morning to Tuesday morning. Weekend waste, which inevitably contains thrown-away foodstuffs, is invariably put out on a Sunday evening, if nothing else because individuals have the free time to do so. By delaying collection twenty-four hours, there was an extended window of opportunity in which foxes could attack the refuse bags for sustenance. With abundant nutrients came mass immigration. Soon enough, Merton households were feeding not only local foxes but also specimens from as far a field as Coulsdon, Tadworth and Worcester Park. A late night visitor to those dark, potholed streets bore witness to scenes of practically orgiastic abandon, with dozens of foxes eating, dancing and coupling by street-light; milling and mewling, some mangy and others magnificent, all neither quite feline nor quite canine. Funny, messy animals.
Problematically for Peter, by spelling out the conspiracy in his much-circulated and inadvertently very amusing pamphlet, he drew the attention of the locals to the possibility of regeneration funding, something which the ineffectual local MP had tried but failed to do. A month after posting his pamphlets through every door in a half-mile radius, he received a reply of sorts. One Clarice Arthur, "proud Mertonian of seven years' standing", had authored a pamphlet of her own (or a flier, more precisely; a mere one page of text compared to Peter Jameson's seven).
Making no reference to the crusade which had inspired it, Clarice announced that it had come to her attention that, with the right level of local support and lobbying, their modest corner of Merton, a little way off the high street, could benefit from smoother roads and upmarket retail franchises. Recipients of the flier were urged to write to or email their MP and certain council representatives forthwith, and Clarice even provided an address for her personal website, where a template for such a letter could be found. (Peter did not have the Internet at home, being unconvinced of its usefulness, and suspicious of its ubiquity.)
And thus, some six months after first raising The Fox Question, Peter found himself wandering through a much-changed neighbourhood. Potholes had been duly filled, and a well-known clothing chain had opened a modest store at the end of his road, closest to the high street. The chain specialised in casual apparel, but 'casual' in the middle-class sense. Non-team specific rugby shirts adorned mannequins in the window display, and on their feet they wore intentionally distressed-looking deck shoes. Nautical symbols abounded: an anchor badge sewn here, a porthole logo there. Peter had nothing against sea-goers, other than pirates of course, but he felt the shop's wares were out of place in landlocked Merton, and moreover a sign of the gentrification which he had long feared was coming.
Those prematurely aged deck shoes were the warning ripples of a much larger swell, now fast approaching. The sturdy seawall had been breached by a flier-shaped torpedo, with a warhead of civic pride and ambition, impact-detonating. And which villainous Kapitän zur See had piloted the U-boat, reflected Peter? It was none other than Clarice Arthur...