Pianist Pavel Kushnir died on 27 July 2024. He was imprisoned at a pre-trial detention centre on charges of intending to incite terrorism online, and died from complications arising from a hunger strike. He would have been 40 just under two months later.
By the time two weeks had passed, Kushnir had been reborn. Labelled as a face of the Suffering in Putin’s prisons by the Washington Post, his obituaries made the rounds across the US and Europe.
He became a symbol: a brilliant young artist disillusioned with the horror of his government’s actions. His book – a cut-up of diary entries, narrative, and extracts of classic Russian novels – was immediately translated and published in Germany.
Kushnir had been imprisoned for 5 subscribers to his YouTube channel. Just eleven mourners attended his funeral. In one fell swoop, he became an internationally recognised figure. It is a familiar, nasty, kind of irony.
In a bitter reflection of the tragedy, the only comments of his mother – Irina Levina, 79 – to the BBC were “I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and stay out of politics altogether… I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing at all.”
The shockwaves from Kushnir’s death have, however, managed to make a deep impact as far away as Manchester. In an interview Maurielle McGarvey described to me how she came across the news in a “two paragraph write up in the New York Times”. It occurred to her even then that the attention-grabbing phrasing – “genius pianist, absurdist novel, eccentric figure” – hid a more complex figure.
McGarvey, whose previous work has delved into mental health support in Wisconsin and the sexual assault of women at fraternities at the University of South California seen through an adaptation of The Women at Troy, then set about creating Pavel Kushnir in Concert. She saw in Pavel Kushnir a question that seems more relevant every day: under fascism, where lies the artist?
The play was written by McGarvey, directed by McGarvey and Natalie Ings, produced by Mizuki Imamura, with designer Sophie Wilkinson, sound designer Rebecca Horton, and dramaturg Neetha Baiju. It is both a rough adaptation and the first English translation of Kushnir’s 2014 book, Russian Cut-Up.
Within the dark confines of the SU theatre, the play’s staging is simplistic for the most part, the only large pieces of staging the odd chair. At the same time, it’s details almost make it seem cluttered, the debris of Pavel’s (Ben McCamley) life – a bouquet of flowers, a tray of never eaten food, a length of tinsel – is scattered along the edges, individual pieces coming into play before being discarded again.
The narrative follows an abbreviated series of vignettes from the last ten years of Pavel’s life, skimming from the Kursk philharmonic to a tense stay in Moscow with his estranged older brother, to the last months of his life, wasting away in prison. It would have been possible for the plot to bear the weight of the production. Kushnir’s life was full of tension, and that his death made that life a lens through which to see the cruelty the government he lived under is a fact as inarguable as it is true.
But Pavel Kushnir in Concert is more than just the story. More, even, than just a martyrdom. Its intention, as McGarvey explained to me, was to have to have the audience view Pavel entirely as a person. To love him. Rather than allowing him to remain a symbol within the play, the play became an expression of his inner world, the outer world subject to the ebb and flow of his perspective.
Central to this was the music. Kushnir began to play at 2, learning from his parents – both of whom were pianists – and at the very heart of the play is the advice given to the fictionalised Pavel by his father that the true communication between the artist and the audience comes from the artist’s conviction. The closest thing to a universal understanding is the knowledge of what the artist means when they play.
Pavel is devoted to his music, and his ideals of freedom are an integral part of his playing. He clashes again and again with director Stuskochev (Xavi Goodhall) over what he is allowed to play. The ultimate freedom of expression would be a solo concert, utterly impossible given the strict regulation of even classical music under Russia’s government.
Co-director Natalie Ings told me how, in the construction of the play, they had drawn upon the authoritarian Russian regulations of music. It must be collective in a direct contradiction of the country’s longstanding tradition of solo pianists. This tension is a perfect conduit for Pavel’s struggles and the weight under his country crushes him.
Another brilliant element that is explored within the play is Pavel’s YouTube channel. Kushnir posted under the pseudonym ‘Foreign Agent Mulder’ in an homage to Agent Mulder of the X-Files, a staunch disbeliever in his own government.
In the play, Agent Mulder (Will Phillpotts) appears to Pavel with an electric guitar, first baiting him into action, then underscoring his impassioned monologues with exhilarating riffs. It is a fantastic moment, made feasible by the astonishing vulnerability of McCamley’s performance.
McCamley plays the titular role with brilliant sensitivity. His frenetic energy comes in fits and bursts, while the raw vulnerability of his emotion makes for a character who almost explodes into the atmosphere of the theatre, even when quiet and restrained.
The rest of the cast, Xavi Goodall, Sarah Waghorn, Will Philpotts, and Owen Gunn, are only barely outshone. The small size of the cohort is deliberate, the intention behind it, McGarvey explained, was to reflect the number of subscribers that earned Kushnir his imprisonment.
Five people were enough to cause his imprisonment, and now five actors play all the figures surrounding Pavel in his life, blending one role with another so much that it intentionally becomes almost confusing for the audience to keep track of who is who. Rather than a clear-cut depiction of the events of Pavel’s life, the only consistency we are given is our knowledge of how he feels.
The actors in their simple black clothes become allusions, rather than allegories, the perfect representation of the play’s masterful understanding of how to convey personal feeling.
At the end of the day Pavel Kushnir in Concert is, as put by McGarvey, still “a workshop” of a developing work. It scenes flow so fluidly that they sometimes reach the point of confusion, and the breathless energy of its cast leaves it feeling at times just a little rough around the edges.
Nevertheless, the play’s flaws are just as much its virtues. It’s the raw emotion, both behind the scenes and on stage, that makes it so powerful. McCamely confessed that, during the performance’s last night at the SU theatre when the stage went dark and the audience and the cast sat to watch a video of Kushnir’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor, he was overcome with genuine grief.
In the audience, the last line of the play, a simple thank you, felt like a tangible weight. The viewers, who had played the roles of interested concertgoers, the surveying eyes of Moscow, and the silent witnesses to sickening injustice, were asked only to care.
Pavel Kushnir has already become a symbol, an abstracted memory spread out across headlines. But within this production he has, at least, been given something like a memorial.
