HOLY FOOL
Park Theatre
★★★★
“strong character acting and wry, comic moments to leaven the harsh story”
The theme of this new play by writers Rosalind Adler and Lea Sellers, just opening at the Park Theatre, is how the artistic world (music in this case) acts and reacts under a despotic regime led by a tyrant who can topple individuals with a single word.
Holy Fool is set at the height of the Stalin era of Soviet history, when cultural policy in this period centred on the doctrine of Socialist Realism. This mandated that all art must be optimistic and uplifting, accessible to the masses, and ideologically correct – in other words serve the interests of the Party. There are parallels to be drawn with current world powers. It is these that the writers and director Kate Fahy are keen to draw out in choosing Dimitri Shostakovich as the subject for this portrait of an artist under pressure.
Dimitri Shostakovich (Mitya) produced an extraordinary range of music. In his time it garnered both extreme praise for his genius and great hostility for the modern discordant elements of his compositions. Living under constant threat of torture and death, he walked a tightrope between appeasement of the tyrant and resistance to the strangling cultural environment. His story is skilfully told in a chronological narrative, and at the back of a dark, era-defining set (William Fricker) that includes a grand piano, and microphones that drop from the ceiling, we are given key dates on a black screen, including that of Stalin’s death, to help us navigate major events.
Four fine actors play the central roles (as well as an assembly of other characters): Mitya (Benjamin O’Mahony), his wife Nina (Jenna Augen), friend Izaak (Fergus O’Donnell) and a young woman who falls under Mitya’s spell, Katya (Phoebe Pryce). O’Mahony is, in turn, brilliant as the composer, then febrile, anxious and angry as the man. Augen as his soul mate and equal, maintains a solid but also light presence, wryly comic at turns, frustrated and tolerant. When she disappears from the narrative, after her death, we miss her almost as much as her husband does. As Mitya ages, Fahy makes the very sensible decision to let his gait and body movement tell of his deterioration without the need for superfluous make-up.
Shostakovich’s fourth symphony is the device which connects the narrative – composed between 1935 and 1936, then cancelled, achieving its premiere only in 1961. This is used cleverly (along with other compositions) by the writers and the creative team as a vibrant part of the drama. Finally, as the action moves toward Mitya’s last years, the back projection magically resolves into a vision of a freedom and safety that lights up the dramatic space – a middle class street of an American suburb in a time of hope: the sixties and seventies.
Overall, the threat of the Socialist Realism era is rather underplayed. However, this is not the first time, and it won’t be the last, that despots have tried to use force to silence artists. Underground resistance and the human spirit is the story told here in an extremely well created and performed piece of work, with strong character acting and wry, comic moments to leaven the harsh story.
HOLY FOOL
Park Theatre
Reviewed on 3rd September 2026
by Louise Sibley
Photography by Mark Douet
