The Bedbug

1.March  2.Galop  3.Foxtrot  4.Waltz  5.Intermezzo  6.Scene in the Boulevard  7.Closing March


Shostakovich’s first theatre-score is also one of his funniest and most satirical. He wrote it for one of the most notorious avant-garde theatre productions of the early 20th century, the great director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s staging of the poet Mayakovsky’s dystopian political comedy ‘The Bedbug’.


In the first half of the play we meet Prisypkin, a cynical young Soviet official of the era of the Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the mid-1920s, outrageously on the make and oblivious to revolutionary idealism. He ruthlessly dumps his girlfriend and marries a vulgar petty-bourgeois hair-dresser whose financial and social prospects he considers more advantageous. As they celebrate their wedding, to the accompaniment of raucous choral and orchestral music from Shostakovich, the hair-dressing saloon burns down. Miraculously, although everyone else is killed, Prisypkin is cryogenically preserved in the frozen ashes.


The second half is set in a museum in the futuristic Communist paradise that will be the happy destiny of all mankind. Here two completely useless and parasitical forms of life are exhibited to remind people how terrible things used to be. One is the humble bedbug, the other our anti-hero, Prisypkin, now defrosted and preserved as a typical example of useless bourgeois man.


It is said that the young Mayakovsky told the even younger Shostakovich that he wanted the music to be as vulgar as possible and to sound like “firemen’s bands”. The colourful result is like a cross between Kurt Weill and an American marching band, with plenty of echoes of early jazz. A short orchestral suite from ‘The Bedbug’ begins and ends with a pair of noisy brass-band marches. In between come two cheeky and sleazy dance numbers, Intermezzo and Scene in the Boulevard.


Note by Gerard McBurney