Elena Arvigo‘s solo woman show for Rhymes with Purple is a powerful hour of emotionally strong political theatre that tries hard to find a division between love and death, but ultimately concludes they are essentially indivisible when the two are experienced in one relationship.

The relationship in question is that between a Russian woman Lyudmilla Ignatenko, played by Arvigo, the wife of Vasily Ignatenko, an early-responder firefighter at the Chernobyl Nuclear plant on 26th April 1986.

Although in this production, Lyudmilla becomes an Italian woman (Arvigo is Italian) this adds an emotional depth to the story as it allows the actor to introduce her own language at key dramatic moments in the retelling of her experience. It also adds a level of complexity that may not actually add to the storytelling transparency.

The play is drawn from a segment of Prayer for Chernobyl by Belarusian Nobel Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, and anyone familiar with the TV show Chernobyl will recognise the character as the pregnant woman that gets through the barrier of the authorities to visit her dying husband in the Moscow Hospital Number Six.

How could this be possible when, the day before the explosion, the only concern of this rhapsodically in love young couple was what time they’d harvest potatoes with Vasily’s mother?

In essence this is a tale of love, grief, and anger for the loss of the many thousands of lives in Pripyat in northern Ukraine, but for Lyudmilla it’s, not surprisingly, most pointedly about her husband, Vasily.

Whilst the dramatic tension focuses on her grief, the underlying critique is of the Soviet regime that so badly deserts the needs of its citizens, ‘Perque? Perque? Why? Why?’ laments Arvigo.  Why have the authorities behaved in the way they have?  Obfuscating the truth, lying to the people.  Increasing their heavily documented later illnesses and deaths. Why? We’ll never know.

‘The tragedy may have started with the explosion,’ bemoans Arvigo ‘But the negatives never end’.

It’s a bold performance with nothing left in the tank on a stiflingly hot ZOO Playground stage, but the gloomy lighting throughout makes it challenging to even focus on some of the action and this makes for a gruelling hour. Nevertheless it’s a great piece of theatre, drawn from a larger two hour production that’s definitely worth seeing for anyone who has an interest in the story of Chernobyl, something that must haunt the memories of most folk over the age of 50.

The icily true statement that grounds this piece is that we should, ‘always be afraid of governments, not the people,’ and in an age where respect for political authority is paper thin the lessons of April 1986 have clearly not been learned.

Atomic Tales is at Playground 1 at ZOO Playground