"The Cellar and the Almond Tree" was originally broadcast in 1970 as a "Wednesday Play" and repeated the following year as a "Play for Today", the title of the BBC's flagship drama programme having been changed in the interim when it was moved from Wednesday to Thursday. The action is set somewhere in Eastern Europe in the late forties or early fifties, in a country where the Communists have recently seized power. The country is never named in the play, but it has much in common with Czechoslovakia, with which the author David Mercer had had a long association. (His first wife had been Czech).
The main characters are the aristocratic Countess Isabel von Reger, and Volubin, a writer and Communist Party official. Although the new regime have seized most of her property, they have allowed the Countess to remain in a small apartment in the family's castle, where she lives with only her maidservant Marenka for company. The local Party hierarchy are holding a dinner in the castle's dining room, and Volubin is entrusted with the task of obtaining the keys to the wine cellar from the Countess. (As in Orwell's "1984", fine wines seem to be the preserve of the Inner Party, despite their ostensible commitment of equality). This is a more difficult task than it might seem, because the Countess is not entirely in her right mind and lives in a world of her own, not comprehending the recent changes which have affected her country. Her condition is due less to senility than to the shock she suffered when her only son was killed in the war.
The past histories of the Countess and Volubin are told in a series of flashbacks. The "almond tree" of the title is one planted by the Countess as a girl and which plays an important part in her memories. We learn that Volubin has, like the Countess, been marked by grief. During the German occupation he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, and his girlfriend Katie, who had naively gone to Russia to help the Soviet people "build socialism", was executed during Stalin's purges. As a result he has become embittered and, although he remains a Party member, he no longer believes in Communist ideology. The "cellar" of the title refers not just to the wine cellar but also to the cellars in which Volubin was held during his imprisonment.
Peter Vaughan was someone I normally thought of as a character actor who played supporting roles, notably Harry Grout in "Porridge", but when he got a chance to play a leading role he could be excellent, as he was in "A Warning to the Curious" (one of the BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas), and as he is here. His Volubin is a man who was once a poet with an idealistic belief in the possibility of a better future for mankind. Now he is a stooped, melancholy figure, too disillusioned to write any more poetry or to cherish any more fond hopes, and desperately trying to hold onto his humanity in a world grown harsh and inhumane. In a way he is as much a figure of the past as Celia Johnson's Countess (another excellent performance). Both are looking backward to what they see as a better world, the Countess to her privileged girlhood, Volubin to the days when he could still believe in something.
Three other characters play important roles. The sharp-tongued Marenka talks of getting a job in a factory but remains with the Countess, less out of loyalty than in a spirit of "better the devil you know". Volubin's party colleague, Blaustein, is a cynical pragmatist with no more belief in the system than Volubin but happy to do whatever it takes to survive, including ingratiating himself with those in power. Volubin's friend Robert Kelvin, who only appears in the flashback scenes, is a British Marxist writer who retains his belief in the Communist system.
Mercer, like Orwell, was politically on the Left, but believed that one could be a Leftist without being a Stalinist, and he was critical of those British and Western Marxists who like Kelvin lent their enthusiastic support to the authoritarian, morally bankrupt Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. "The Cellar and the Almond Tree" was written shortly after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the overthrow of Dubcek's reformist government, which Mercer denounced as "one of the vilest events that's ever occurred" but which was defended by the pro-Soviet Left as a necessary measure to crush "revisionism".
There is an ironic but very moving ending to the play. The Countess descends to her old dining room, hardly noticing that it is now adorned with portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, believing that the official dinner is a grand aristocratic banquet like the ones she remembers from her youth. And, in a way, it is, except that the guests all belong to the new red aristocracy rather than the old one. Meanwhile, Volubin is arrested to be dragged away, no doubt, to yet another cellar. We never learn what his alleged crime is. Perhaps he never learns either. Perhaps his Party comrades have noticed his disillusionment with the system and have come to suspect him of Thoughtcrime. A sad downfall for a man who tried hard to keep his decency while all around him were jettisoning theirs as quickly as possible. 9/10.
The main characters are the aristocratic Countess Isabel von Reger, and Volubin, a writer and Communist Party official. Although the new regime have seized most of her property, they have allowed the Countess to remain in a small apartment in the family's castle, where she lives with only her maidservant Marenka for company. The local Party hierarchy are holding a dinner in the castle's dining room, and Volubin is entrusted with the task of obtaining the keys to the wine cellar from the Countess. (As in Orwell's "1984", fine wines seem to be the preserve of the Inner Party, despite their ostensible commitment of equality). This is a more difficult task than it might seem, because the Countess is not entirely in her right mind and lives in a world of her own, not comprehending the recent changes which have affected her country. Her condition is due less to senility than to the shock she suffered when her only son was killed in the war.
The past histories of the Countess and Volubin are told in a series of flashbacks. The "almond tree" of the title is one planted by the Countess as a girl and which plays an important part in her memories. We learn that Volubin has, like the Countess, been marked by grief. During the German occupation he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, and his girlfriend Katie, who had naively gone to Russia to help the Soviet people "build socialism", was executed during Stalin's purges. As a result he has become embittered and, although he remains a Party member, he no longer believes in Communist ideology. The "cellar" of the title refers not just to the wine cellar but also to the cellars in which Volubin was held during his imprisonment.
Peter Vaughan was someone I normally thought of as a character actor who played supporting roles, notably Harry Grout in "Porridge", but when he got a chance to play a leading role he could be excellent, as he was in "A Warning to the Curious" (one of the BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas), and as he is here. His Volubin is a man who was once a poet with an idealistic belief in the possibility of a better future for mankind. Now he is a stooped, melancholy figure, too disillusioned to write any more poetry or to cherish any more fond hopes, and desperately trying to hold onto his humanity in a world grown harsh and inhumane. In a way he is as much a figure of the past as Celia Johnson's Countess (another excellent performance). Both are looking backward to what they see as a better world, the Countess to her privileged girlhood, Volubin to the days when he could still believe in something.
Three other characters play important roles. The sharp-tongued Marenka talks of getting a job in a factory but remains with the Countess, less out of loyalty than in a spirit of "better the devil you know". Volubin's party colleague, Blaustein, is a cynical pragmatist with no more belief in the system than Volubin but happy to do whatever it takes to survive, including ingratiating himself with those in power. Volubin's friend Robert Kelvin, who only appears in the flashback scenes, is a British Marxist writer who retains his belief in the Communist system.
Mercer, like Orwell, was politically on the Left, but believed that one could be a Leftist without being a Stalinist, and he was critical of those British and Western Marxists who like Kelvin lent their enthusiastic support to the authoritarian, morally bankrupt Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. "The Cellar and the Almond Tree" was written shortly after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the overthrow of Dubcek's reformist government, which Mercer denounced as "one of the vilest events that's ever occurred" but which was defended by the pro-Soviet Left as a necessary measure to crush "revisionism".
There is an ironic but very moving ending to the play. The Countess descends to her old dining room, hardly noticing that it is now adorned with portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, believing that the official dinner is a grand aristocratic banquet like the ones she remembers from her youth. And, in a way, it is, except that the guests all belong to the new red aristocracy rather than the old one. Meanwhile, Volubin is arrested to be dragged away, no doubt, to yet another cellar. We never learn what his alleged crime is. Perhaps he never learns either. Perhaps his Party comrades have noticed his disillusionment with the system and have come to suspect him of Thoughtcrime. A sad downfall for a man who tried hard to keep his decency while all around him were jettisoning theirs as quickly as possible. 9/10.
