Reviews for The Love-Girl and the Innocent: A Play

The average rating for The Love-Girl and the Innocent: A Play based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-05 00:00:00 Norman Hew-shue Comrade Stalin was quite right. He said, "Personnel selection is decisive. People are our most valuable capital." I want that slogan up in the camp yard. Unlike our pantomime morality dramas where there are villains of the first order, a Platonic form of Evil -- what this play depicts is that everyone has a jackal within. Well, almost everyone. The gulag simply brought these lesser angels to the fore, a character here calls their world Campland and one of its cardinal features is that 99 people cry and one person laughs. The titular characters are swept into a labor camp in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War and find a fleeting human connection while they are tortured by the logic of their present existence. He a former officer in the Soviet army is the rube, unwilling to accept the human costs of his position as labor organizer. She is an orphan of Koba's wet dream of socialist perfection. He is soon demoted and she must satisfy the carnal whims of her superiors. Despite the debasement both recognize their doomed attraction as palpable. Such are the consolations of the informed.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-23 00:00:00 Francis Fallot I love Russian literature, so I expected to like this, but it just isn't for me. First of all, the title doesn't accurately depict what the play is about. It's not about Lyuba and Nemov at all, really. It's about Russian work camps right after the war: the corruption, the labor, the deprivation, and the corruption again. Basically, all the workers (prisoners or not) are trying to get by and make the best out of a horrific situation. Lyuba and Nemov are just two types, not only as literary characters but even within the world of the play itself. They don't have a particularly dominant or even a particularly interesting storyline. Second of all, the stage directions are too complex for reading. I couldn't really picture the scenes. I love reading plays, and I can usually follow along and see them in my mind, but this one was just not a well-written play. Maybe it's much better performed, but good plays are ones that can be read as fluidly as they can be seen. I love Peter Shaffer. Amadeus is just as excellent to read as it is to see (the movie, I mean; I never saw a stage production). Shaffer's stage directions are intricate; he is not a minimalist by any means. Still, I can follow his plays. I know what's happening and where. Third of all, there are far too many characters. This is a play, not War and Peace. In a thousand-page novel that spans many years, tens or hundreds of characters make sense. In a four-act play, however, too many characters hinder character development and plot momentum. I still own One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and would like to give it a try. I'm not sure I will want to, though. I still love Russian literature and always will. This play really isn't for me, though, so I can't recommend it. After thinking about it some more, the number of characters makes sense. Too many people were confined to work camps, just as there are too many characters in the play. The reader/viewer isn't supposed to get to know the characters because people in the camps either died, got released, or were transferred before they could make any real connections with each other. I need to give Solzhenitsyn more credit than I initially did. That being said, I change my rating to a 2.5. It's still low because I still don't feel a connection to the play. He could have done a better job really highlighting the disconnect, the emotion, the struggle. Maybe he didn't want to because it's better to disconnect from the emotion to get by (after all, Solzhenitsyn lived in a labor camp himself, so he knew what mental labor people had to complete to keep from being "goners"), but I like character-driven literature. I can, then, recommend this to people who don't mind a more distanced view of work camp life and who don't mind plot- and setting-driven works. Sorry to belabor this review (pun intended, of course).