No Stone Theatre
LIKE many projects, preparations for Seeds of Hope, the latest stage production from No Stone Theatre, were cut short by the pandemic. Inspired by Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet agronomist who created the first global seed bank, the play has been revived as a podcast series and renamed Seeds.
You wouldn’t notice that the audio drama has been adapted, mind, because it is a perfect fit for this medium – and is imbued with surprising new resonances.
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The main plot follows four scientists in the USSR during the second world war. While Leningrad (now St Petersburg) starves as it endures one of the longest sieges in history, Irina, Dimitri, Zasha and Leonid work tirelessly to protect the 250,000 seed, root and fruit samples under their care.
Vavilov is their director, come unstuck through honesty. Asked by Joseph Stalin to develop frost-resistant crops, he tells him it would take at least 10 years. Trofim Lysenko, a purveyor of pseudoscience, assures Stalin he can produce them almost instantly. Vavilov soon disappeared.
Vavilov died in prison in 1943, possibly of hunger, the same fate that befell some scientists at his Leningrad institute. Throughout the siege, they refused to eat the samples, and many starved.
The nobility of Vavilov and his team’s mission to feed the world is unquestionable. In the present day, world hunger is rising again after a decade of decline. In light of covid-19 interrupting supply chains and nutrition schemes, the UN World Food Programme has warned that the number of people facing acute food insecurity could nearly double by the end of 2020. To highlight Vavilov’s work at such a moment is incredibly moving.
Sadly, the anti-science sentiment Seeds explores is also very relevant. “Scientists fall in and out of favour, particularly now,” warns Irina (Katy Stephens). The denialism and misinformation the researchers face have obvious equivalents today in everything from climate science to covid-19, though these parallels aren’t always highlighted subtly.
But the podcast’s second storyline elevates the production to great. In the modern day, a woman known as Patient (Nina Sosanya) wakes in hospital, unaware how she got there or who she is. Soon, she is searching St Petersburg for answers.
Patient shelters beneath a monument to Mikhail Lomonosov, the father of Russian science, and imagines dying in the rain. Amid the statues and squares, she feels she is being stalked by a beast on the horizon. It is “also on a journey, like I am”, she says. “Also burning and also hungry.”
Care has been taken to make eerie soundscapes envelop the listener: Dimitri (Graeme Rose), for instance, is plagued by a scratching sound that will eat away at your nerves just as surely as his. Yet it is the sense that Patient is beside you, whispering thoughts of starvation in your ear, that most disconcerts.
Nick Walker’s script is full of these dark imaginings, while other fragments recurring in both timelines, from Lomonosov and the city’s Hotel Astoria to a series of imperilled cats, hint at revelations to come. As Patient’s memory returns, the mystery of who she is and whether she relates to those four scientists begins to clear.
All in all, Seeds is strange and disquieting. Although I don’t know how the series ends, its original title suggests that some hope, however small, will prevail. What is clear, though, is that ignorance in the face of scientific efforts to prevent suffering isn’t a problem that has gone away.
