Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen – review

A Russian revolution: Pussy Riot perform in Red Square in January 2012. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov /Reuters

My frustrations with Masha Gessen's Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot crystallise when I reach the beginning of chapter nine and discover that I have entered the story: "Two days before the trial began, the British newspaper the Guardian came out with a huge story," Gessen writes. "Pussy Riot aren't just the coolest revolutionaries you're ever likely to meet. They're also the nicest," gushed the writer, Carole Cadwalladr." Gessen quotes the piece, published here in the Observer New Review in July 2012, at length, noting that "her [ie my] editor had dispatched her in a fit of sudden inspiration". And recounts how thrilled Petya Verzilov, the husband of Nadya Tolokonnikova, is with it. "He sensed, correctly, that this was a first taste of true fame."

On the one hand, "gushing" aside, it's more than a bit flattering. This is a hotly anticipated book by one of Russia's most influential opposition journalists. On the other… well, I can't help thinking I've been taken slightly out of context. It's never explained that the women I met aren't the same as the ones she's spent the past eight chapters writing about – the three facing trial, Tolokonnikova and her cellmates Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, for committing "hooliganism" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. But then Gessen barely acknowledges the other members of Pussy Riot at all. Maybe she has decided that they were just YouTube cannon fodder drafted in to bulk up the numbers, but it would be nice to have that explained. And backed up with the odd quote.

Am I nit-picking? Possibly. But how does Gessen know how I came to be in Moscow? It's a minor point but the unfortunate thing is that it consolidates my frustrations with the first eight chapters of the book: it's unclear where her information has come from. Whole swaths of the story are cited as facts when there's little attribution and almost no sourcing.

It's frustrating because there's no doubt that Gessen – a Russian-American journalist, who was sacked from the editorship of Russia's oldest magazine for refusing to cover an event featuring Putin – was the right person to write this book. She wrote a scathing and widely acclaimed biography of Putin, The Man Without a Face, and was a key member of opposition circles during the 2012 protests.

There's a mutual, deserved respect between Pussy Riot and her. Tolokonnikova agrees to write to her from jail, and at one point meets her during one of the few visiting sessions she's allowed. Samutsevich, who avoids jail, talks to her at length, as does Petya Verzilov. (Though it doesn't stop Gessen from accusing him of colluding with the lawyers to try and financially exploit Pussy Riot by trademarking the name. The accusation isn't sourced. And Verzilov isn't given a right to reply… so who knows?)

Despite the lack of access to two of her main characters, Gessen works with what she's got, and for the most part it's a pacy telling of what is an extraordinary story: how a bunch of young women took on the Kremlin by dancing around in coloured tights and dresses. And she's good on how these young activists, whose art showed a sophisticated understanding of social media, explicitly draw connections between themselves and the dissidents of the Soviet past. But then Russia's past weighs heavily all around. The trial at the heart of the book is a "Soviet political trial replayed as farce".

There are some wonderful details. She has access to the letters Alekhina writes to her friend Olya, and they're some of the best and most humane moments in the book. She immerses herself in the Russian penal code and wages war against the prison authorities. But she also tells Olya, after hours of repetitive sewing in the prison workshop: "It is a wondrous thing, to look out the window. Just to look out the window and nothing else. It is like all the noise in the world recedes and there is so much silence that it fills up my entire head."

Tolokonnikova's letters from prison are more "stilted". She doesn't want to wage a legal battle. She wants her sentence simply to pass. Gessen barely quotes from her letters. Tolokonnikova grew up in Norilsk, a former gulag in the Arctic Circle and now one of the most polluted places on earth. Her determination and autodidacticism won her a place in the philosophy department of Moscow State University at the age of 16, and she has a passion for expounding philosophical theory rather than focusing on personal details. Until last September when something snapped.

She went on hunger strike, and smuggled out an open letter to the world that told of her 16-17-hour days and brutal work regime, the "common hygiene room" shared by 800 prisoners where, when the pipes block, "urine gushes out or faeces go flying", and the absolute lack of humanity. She is now thankfully free, her sentence commuted by Putin ahead of the Winter Olympics. A fact that caused Granta to rush the book out early.

Words Will Break Cement is far from the last word on Pussy Riot. Not least because while being feted by Madonna and co last week will no doubt have been fun, it's what Pussy Riot choose to do next that will be interesting.

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The Mistress Contract; Happy Days; The Cement Garden – review

Danny Webb and Saskia Reeves in The Mistress Contract at the Royal Court: 'a real-life story, and an annoying one'. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Samuel Butler said it was very good of God to let Thomas and Jane Carlyle marry each other: it meant that only two people rather than four were made miserable. I felt much the same about the She and He in Abi Morgan's new play The Mistress Contract. Thank goodness this pair got together and prevented another couple being driven mad with boredom.

The Mistress Contractby Abi MorganRoyal Court, LondonStarts 30 JanuaryUntil 22 MarchBox office:
020 7565 5000Venue website

She and He (no names) are lovers. They knew each other at college but then lost touch. Twenty years and several marriages later they meet again and start an affair. She, a teacher who seems to spend more time in women's groups than with her students, finds herself becoming angry with their arrangements and proposes a deal, a written contract. In return for "mistress services" (which boils down to sex whenever and however her lover wants it), he will supply "tasteful accommodations" and "expenses". He, an affluent businessman, accepts eagerly – once he's run the paperwork past his lawyer. The arrangement is enduring. Neatly concealed till the end of Abi Morgan's play is the fact of their spectacular ages.

This is a real-life story, perhaps even a true one. Morgan has based her plays on tapes the couple made of their conversations in restaurants, in bed, over breakfast. It's also an annoying one. "She" seems hellbent on giving feminism a bad name. She talks up her miseries, not least the unpleasantness of sucking cocks, but runs herself down: "I am much less skilled at speaking." She speaks a lot, of equality as if it were as measurable as a bag of sugar. She is stuck in a parody of feminism which sees it as naturally opposed to the idea of liking men. He is stereotypically short on emotional nuance and eager to get his trousers off, pretty much for anyone. Both start from the assumption that He will have a good time in the sack and She won't.

Saskia Reeves and Danny Webb can't make this grim couple engaging, though with great skill they suggest their gradual ageing. Of course He and She don't have to be likable to be interesting, but to demand attention their conversation needs more layers than this. Their only topic is themselves. There are no undercurrents, no surprising contradictions, hardly any tonal variety. In Vicky Featherstone's production everything is explicit. Merle Hensel's design shows a parched, unchanging Californian landscape with a phallic cactus. This allows some meaningful talk about the need for irrigation. Until the very end all exchanges take place with Reeves and Webb standing as if, far from having a series of intimate encounters, they were engaged in public debate.

As perhaps they were all along. It turns out that those tapes were made with a purpose other than that of recollection. They are turned into a book. And now, of course, a play. So enmired is He and She's language in the idea of mercantile exchange it should come as no surprise that they want to cash in their memories. Was that the point all along?

Juliet Stevenson in Happy Days: ‘Her sincerity and fervent naturalism light up the role.’ Photograph: Tristram Kenton

You would have to go a long way to find a more intensely feminist play than Happy Days, which was first staged in 1961. It makes a woman the centre of a play that talks of the human condition. You can, it suggests, have a handbag and still speak for everyone. For me, this has always been a more genial, though not more ingratiating play than Waiting for Godot. It is one of Beckett's Charon-like dramas, ferrying a human audience from daily life to the other side of realism. It has, as does Krapp's Last Tape, one foot in the dull and one in the barmy. "What's it meant to mean?" asks a man, looking at this female yapping away while "stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground". "What," responds his wife, "are you meant to mean?" The marvellous thing about this exchange, exactly catching some first responses to Beckett, is that it is within the play itself.

At first Juliet Stevenson seems an unlikely Beckettian. She doesn't offer the customary music hall vivacity or bleached wanness. In fact, her sincerity and fervent naturalism light up the role of Winnie. She steers a fine line between braveness and bravura with nothing of the incantatory in her speech. She dips cosily but adventurously into her marvellous bag, as if it's likely to contain, along with a gun, the heavens' embroidered cloths. She shows life leaching from her, as it does from the terminally ill. In Natalie Abrahami's absorbing production each lurch towards death is accompanied by a fizzling roar. At the same time, Vicki Mortimer's sympathetic, bleak design makes the landscape look like a costume. A warmly coloured skirt of shingle at first spreads out like a New Look frock. Later, thanks to the great Paule Constable's lighting, that shingle becomes grey, and risen around Stevenson's neck like a surgical collar.

'Florid and bustling': Georgia Clarke-Day, George Mackay and Ruby Bentall in The Cement Garden at the Vaults. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The Vaults might seem a perfect setting for The Cement Garden. Under Waterloo station, led up to by a concrete graffiti corridor, the place echoes with the rumble of trains, as Ian McEwan's first novel rumbles with the approach of sex and police cars and discovery and death. Yet this is not a perfect match of styles. McEwan's prose is slinky with wit and suggestion. Its tale of a parent buried in the cellar, and adolescent fumbles buried under bewildered shame is offered up almost implacably, as if it were an everyday story of youthful folk. McEwan rarely raises his voice. David Aula's production too often does so. Its limber young cast swing from girders. The youngest child, over-emphatically powerless, is played by a brown paper puppet. Spoken directly to the audience, running over the action as a commentary, the first-person narrative is made florid and bustling.

This staging is not frightening, but it is full of ideas and slowly the evening delivers some feeling of the novel. Ruby Bentall has the smug seductiveness of a cat; David Annen almost bursts from his skin with frustration. One aspect, often overlooked in excitement about sibling incest scenes, sings out clearly. You are against boys dressing as girls because you think it's bad to be a girl, one child coolly points out. Feminism is here too.

Star ratings (out of 5)
The Mistress Contract **
Happy Days ****
The Cement Garden ***

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