Son of Stalin

What do you do when the RSC turns down a play they commissioned you to do, saying only “It’s a but grim, isn’t it?” You turn to Andrew Lyodd Webber, of course, and ask him to add a few cheery tunes. And that’s exactly what Glaswegian Peter Arnott didn’t do in these circumstances. On the contrary, he told the RSC, “Well, it’s not Cats!” And now, as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival the Corcadorca Theatre Company will offer audiences “rehearsed readings of three plays directed by acclaimed young directors, Thomas Conroy, Tom Creed and Oonagh Kearney.” Conroy choose Arnott’s play, called The Wire Garden which is described as “set in 1941” and an attempt to “imagine the unimaginable?” But what the hell is does that mean?

“Well, it’s based on a true story, with unimaginable bits in it!” Says Arnott, laughing, ”It’s about Stalin’s older son who was a Prisoner of War in the Second world War and he died in a concentration camp in 1943. The attempt is to imagine what happened him form his arrival in that concentration camp, in September 1942, to his death in April ’43.”

Obviously Cats it ain’t!

“That’s what I meant,” he continues. “You can’t have these guys breaking into song! Though they do have some great gags and stories they tell. In fact, he was kept with various ‘oddball’ prisoners, some of whom were British. And some of whom were Irish. But one of the great stories is that these Irish guys were captured at Dunkirk and claimed, to the Germans, to be IRA! But then maybe it wasn’t a yarn.”

Indeed, it was an Irishman’s telling of the story of Stalin’s son who, apparently committed suicide, that originally gave Peter the idea for the play.

“You see, the British, when they were de-briefed after the War, were told to shut up about this,” Arnott explains. ”And the official Soviet account was that the Germans had killed him. So, obviously there is a discrepancy between the two accounts. But because of the lack of actual and accurate historical facts, it gives me great liberty – as a playwright – to tell the tale.”

What is factually verifiable, however, from Stalin’s daughter’s memoirs is the “absolutely appalling relationship” this particular son had with Stalin.

“He only actually met his father for the first time when he was 12 years old and the Germans actually tried to recruit him as a propaganda coup because they knew how bad his relationship was with his father, when his father prevented him from getting married for example,” says Arnott. “He also tried to commit suicide as a young man. But he refused to speak out in public against his father, which absolutely fascinated me. I wanted to understand where this ordinary man find the resources to resist, on the one hand, the father complex to end all father complexes – Stalin! And, on the other hand, resist Hitler! He somehow found in himself not to break. But what really attracted me to his story was that he wasn’t an intellectual, he wasn’t a politician, he was, basically an everyman figure in ways. But it is an extraordinary story.”

Sounds like it will be. And if you want to hear that story it is being read on June 29th at 1pm and 7pm. The other two plays in the ‘Launch’ part of the Festival are Monged written by Gary Duggen and directed by Tom Creed which receives it reading June 27th at the same times. Finally, Seven Deals, written by Alan Pollock and directed by Ooonagh Kearney, will be read June 28th at the same times.