Written and set as the Soviet Union approached collapse, Dear Elena Sergeevna is a chilling dissection of the fragility and breakdown of the social contract. What starts as a teacher’s lonely birthday celebration quickly descends into a sinister morality play where violence and coercion are just the cost of doing business. Though the play marks the debut of emerging theatre company Last Waltz Productions, the young group of actors have proven themselves ambitious in their willingness to portray the darkest parts of humanity.
Elena Sergeevna’s (Teodora Matović) apartment is nicer than you would imagine a Soviet teacher’s home would be. As she prepares a solo celebration for her birthday, three Persian carpets line the floor, and lamps light up the pink walls. Waltz music and Sergeevna’s gymnastics trophies highlight her allegiance to Soviet culture.
Generational differences are immediately clear when her students surprise her by bearing gifts and champagne. While Sergeevna wears a modest dress shirt and long skirt, the four teenagers enter in leather jackets, jeans, and tights. Their dialogue is full of Americanisms. Pasha (Toby Carey) brags about reading Nabokov in English, and Baloja (Faisal Hamza) tells Sergeevna her salad is “exactly what the doctor ordered.”
Matović’s performance establishes the teacher-student relationship with precision and care. She is friendly but distant, kind but firm. She scolds inappropriate jokes while betraying quiet affection and initially refuses gifts before reluctantly accepting them with pride. The atmosphere is so warm initially that the audience is lulled into a false sense of security.
As the play progresses, the actors shrink the stage to build suspense. Lyaja (Madeline Li) begins going through drawers and touching personal items. Pasha takes out a camera to snap photos. Baloja asks Sergeevna for the hospital and surgeon caring for her sick mother. The audience knows the walls are closing in before they ask Sergeevna to hand them a key to a vault containing their exam papers.
The conversation begins to mirror the secret police interrogations that were all too common in Moscow. There are awkward laughs, references to powerful family members, and appeals to Sergeevna’s desire to “do anything for” her students. Vitya (Harry Gilchrist), a giant figure who is increasingly drunk, lurks near her. The threat of physical violence becomes real.
The social cracks foreshadowed earlier start to widen. Pasha and Vitya point out that if they don’t receive high enough marks for university, they may be conscripted — or worse, sent to asylums and injected full of sulfur. The meritocratic system Sergeevna believes in starts to rot as her students argue for the ability to improve their lives by any means necessary.
Baloja is behind it all. A human manifestation of an amoral devil, an archetype familiar in Russian literature, Hamza masterfully takes on the energy of Shakespeare’s Iago. The audience watches helplessly as he prompts, goads, and pushes the buttons of other characters as the tools used to break Sergeevna become vile. When pressed on his motivation, he will casually claim to be bored or subtly hint at a desire for power for power’s sake.
Lyaja’s conversations with Sergeevna hit the hardest. She is often passive on stage, taking naps and attempting multiple times to leave the apartment to avoid being complicit in the extortion. However, when she exercises power at Baloja’s request, it’s over Sergeevna’s womanhood. She insults her cheap lipstick and modest clothing, suggesting Russian women are naive when they hide their beauty and settle for stable work.
At that point, you realise the play is more important than Sergeevna’s choice to hand over the key. The stakes of her breaking are a lot higher. The play not only suggests that moral principles inevitably fail under immense pressure but that ordinary people are the ones who have to endure that pressure. In the dying days of the Soviet Union, the God-fearing people who kept their heads down were the first to be trampled over.
Dear Elena Sergeevna is playing at the Old Fitz Theatre until April 11th
