Review: The Land We Shared

Sophie Winch on the Artsdepot performance of Larisa Faber’s autobiographical tale of life under communism

Three people in unusual costumes standing together — The Land We Shared (Credit – Jeannine Unsen)

Larisa Faber’s play The Land We Shared, an autobiographical account of growing up in communist Romania and returning to it in adulthood, came to the Artsdepot in North Finchley last week.

“This is the story,” a voiceover tells us, “of a bag of clothes, prepared by me, your grandmother”. Little L (Kristin Winters) emerges from a mass of fabrics with a bundle. Beside her, a woman sits motionless by a double bass.

This bundle contains her grandmother’s funerary attire; it transpires that two mistakes have been made. Little L’s grandmother wishes to be buried in her designated outfit, alongside her parents – she has already been buried though, in the wrong place and the wrong clothes. We are transported back to Little L’s childhood; her grandmother (Ruslana Khazipova) comes alive.

The play takes us through Little L’s relationship with her grandmother, and beyond it, as she returns to her homeland to bury her. It is Romanian Communist history told through supermarket aisles and cabbage rolls. There is a compelling and moving mundanity to it, interspersed by shocks of orange light, drumbeats, and the arrival of the secret police as the outside creeps into Little L’s bubble of cooking smells and music.

Little L herself is played with dry wit and childlike charm by Kristin Winters, who keeps the audience enraptured, though her fourth-wall breaks dullen the emotional impact somewhat. All the highs and lows of Little L’s life are played with such extremity that the pivotal points do not hit home as much as they might do, and narrative beats fall flat.

Ruslana Khazipova as the grandmother Silvia is convincing and maternal, though she suffers from a lack of nuance in the writing, as do most characters. This is where the autobiographical nature of the play works to its detriment. We are told that Little L inherits a temper from her father, but only see this in a sympathetic light.

Silvia is unfailingly lovely to Little L and her animosity is completely understandable in the face of the secret police. Little L’s father, meanwhile, played with comedic flair by Ovidiu Mihăița, veers on the side of cartoonish villain; while he seems bathetic and smaller than his impact, there are missed opportunities to reveal him as more emotionally human.

While the entire cast is believable, one gets the impression we are only being shown one person’s side of them. The play seems, eloquently, to be exploring well-trodden themes: the barbarity of the secret police and the Communist regime, the weight of tradition, and the traits we inherit, without looking at the complex humanity of the people who make them.

The set, designed by Marco Godinho, features a drumkit on a platform, a double bass with a chair and, notably, an enormous cabbage hanging from the ceiling. It is all of the play’s subjects made material: tradition through music and the looming weight of ancestral expectation.

The costumes likewise; Sarah Munro puts Silvia in mostly traditional Romanian clothing with threads hanging loose from her sleeves, and Little L in more culturally ambiguous shorts and the same threads hanging from her shirt. The colour palette, predominantly muted green, is a constant reminder of the enormous looming cabbage. The cabbage is excellent.

The Land We Shared, though thought-provoking and funny, seems to lack the emotional punch it might pack. On a more superficial level, though, it is entertaining and compelling, and provides fascinating granular insight into a time in history often only documented by statistics and the scars it left behind.

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