Chernobyl Still in the Limelight, on Stage

SARCOPHAGUS Vladimir Gubaryev. Translated by Michael Glenny. On stage at The Pit in London April through June. At the Mermaid Theatre in London October through December. Available from Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1987. 81 pp. £3.50. A funny thing happened in the London theater this summer with the production of a Russian play called Sarcophagus at The Pit, an intimate little “off-Broadway" type playhouse in the city, far from the West End theaters. Sarcophagus, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, is the work of a Soviet journalist and occasional playwright Vladimir Gubaryev, written within two months of the “worst accident in the world,” at Chernobyl in April 1986. Here at its most poignant is the humor that the nuclear community has always inspired, and in which its opponents are so gravely deficient. The author—an engineer originally who gets his facts right— claims to have been the first reporter on the scene after the explosion. He was sent by Pravda, the Moscow daily, for which he is science editor. He was required both to report and to compose a more reflective contribution to an associated literary monthly called Znamya. The play fulfilled this second commission composed in “the only medium able adequately to convey his thoughts and emotions on this truly terrible subject,” according to his translator Michael Glenny. Znamya had it in print within two months of receiving the manuscript. But London was the first major city to stage Gubaryev’s play, so aptly named after the mighty tomb of concrete and steel that shrouds the remains of Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor. Sarcophagus is not reportage but an adroit attempt to portray the feelings of a small, very disparate group whose routines and confidences were so rudely disrupted by the explosion. The scene is set in a hospital specializing in radiation sickness and all the action takes place in a single day—the day when the first victims of Chernobyl arrive and, in most cases, die. When it opens the hospital has a single patient, a technician from a radiation laboratory who 487 days earlier had gotten drunk and fallen asleep unnoticed for three hours while an experiment was in progress. He received a “fatal” dose of 600 Roentgens. But “Patient K,” as the learned papers called him, is alive and ebullient, a miracle of Soviet medicine, survivor of 16 transplants and star of 14 scientific papers. —K, his name is Krolik (Rabbit)—has no future beyond the ultraviolet curtains that shroud the hospital, for he has no natural resistance to infection. “Fred the Undead”—his own phrase for his predicament— is in every sense as much an experimental animal as the four-legged ones that participate in radiation research here in the hospital. K, played superbly by Nick Woodeson, is the hero of Sarcophagus; a grotesquely endearing figure of mordant wit and unique experience. He is bald but for tufts that somehow dramatically emphasize his problem, as do dentures that suggest that his teeth also fall out. But whatever cosmetic damage the radiation may have done, it has not impaired a quick wit. To entertain three pretty interns who arrive just ahead of Chernobyl’s victims, he invents a romantic tale involving unrequited love and a dose of plutonium. However, the permanent medical staff soon straighten out matters for Faith, Hope and Charity. The assorted victims—firemen, drivers, reactor staff, a peasant woman—are doomed even though they have received much less radiation than K. Like the reactor itself, their radioactive remains will be shrouded in lead and sealed in a sarcophagus as nuclear waste. The interns find it all hard to take. There are moments of particular poignancy, such as one when the reactor physicist in a burst of defiance, cries: “Why is it our fault? The reactor is a perfect device. It’s a miracle. But you simply can’t treat it like....” just as the first victim to die is being carried across the stage. The most bitter joke is saved for the end, when Patient K volunteers some of his own much-transplanted bone marrow to prolong the life of the Chernobyl station director, the person the play pinpoints as responsible for the explosion. “I want to condemn him to life,” is K’s explanation. Fishlock is science editor of the Financial Times of London.

Chernobyl Still in the Limelight, on Stage

SARCOPHAGUS

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