Bed-bug

desperately to be a communist, to serve the working class.

" I want a commissar with a decree to lean over the thought of the age.

I want the heart to earn its love wage at a specialist's rate. want the factory committee to lock when the work is done' But as Trotsky wrote, ' Mayakovsky's revolutionary individualism 1 poured itself into the proletarian Revolution, but did not blend with it. His subconscious feeling for the city, for nature, for the whole world, is not that of a worker, but of a Bohemian.' The tension between the individual artist and the collective could not be resolved in a Russia in which the dead hand of bureaucracy increasingly tightened its grip round the throat of cultural life.

In 1930, Mayakovsky self. •The Bey-ars was produced. by Meyerhold. It was not very successful. Stalin's approval of the author led to his canonisation, but the play was not seen often until 1955. Meyerhold died in the purges in 1939.

By Our Theatre Critic Written when the New Economic Policy, which allowed some return to private trading, was being replaced by the 5-year plan and collectivisation, 'The Bedbug' was an attack on the corruption of Soviet life which had developed in the previous seven years and was now allegedly going to disappear.

The 'hero' is a worker who is using his trade union position to move up the social scale. He discards his former associates and marries into a middle-class family.

Miraculously preserved after a fire at his drunken orgy of a wedding, he awakes with a 50-year hangover in the communist society of the future.

Together with a bed-bug, he is exhibited as a specimen of drinking, smoking, swearing, servile, bug-ridden, pre-socialist man. 1 At the end, he looks at the audience and greets them with joy: 'You're just the same as me!' But this is not just a satirical attack on the remnants of capitalism. In the 1929 production, the chief actor was instructed by the author to imitate his mannerisms.

The loneliness of the individual in his new-found hygenic, democratic, efficient but inhuman world Vladimir Mayakovsky displays Mayakovsky's ambiguous attitude to communism.

The production at The Mermaid by Bernard Miles tends inevitably to over-emphasize the anticommunist undertone in the play. However, the distortion does not, I think, destroy the whole point of the work.

The production is a bit rough in places, but it has the right bawdy, music-hall atmosphere. in the first part and the performance of Joss Ackland gives a good mixture of preposterous vulgarity and repulsive sympathy as the hero.

Something the author did not bargain for is the jazz band, whose members are labelled Carlo Marks, Freddie, Lennie and Joe.

After the interval, a shot is heard and Joe is replaced Leon.

February, 24, 1962 co-existence' has a navictanna' powerful appeal in a world overshadowed by the the imperialists to the graveyard which Soviet propagandists which Soviet propagandists equate broadly with the Com- equate broadly with the Communist parties, is regarded as a useful auxiliary, not as the only force for building socialism.