This seems to be my week for watching or listening to biographical stories set in the former Soviet Union. Who don't cover entirely lives but brief excerpts. On Friday, it was The Last Station, set during the last year of Tolstoy's life, starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, and today, it was Murder in Samarkand, David Hare's radio play about former British ambassador Craig Murray, starring David Tennant, which was broadcast yesterday and then because available to non-Brits like myself through the BBC website I just linked.

( The Last Station, complete with poetry )

Murder in Samarkand the radio play, based on Craig Murray's account of the same name, is fascinating in that it actually avoids making its narrator look very sympathetic, despite casting him with a very popular actor. Murray, despite being not fictional, comes across as a Graham Greene character: he womanizes, he boozes, he's not a little patronizing at first, and when his long-suffering first wife finally has had enough later on, you cheer for her. It's also not a story of moral awakening wherein Our Hero, after being confronted with suffering, mends his profligate ways and becomes a better person; Craig Murray at the end is pretty much the same as he is at the start, and he spends as much time feeling sorry for himself as he does feeling sorry for the citizens of Uzbekistan. What remains true throughout, though, is his genuine outrage at what he finds in Uzbekistan: the human right abuses, the easy way any torture is justified by linking any Muslim to Al-Quaeda, and the utter moral bankruptcy of both the American and British goverments. Hare is great with the dialogue here, but I suspect several statements didn't even need a playwright because they sound just like what the people in question have said in public as well: "There is some argument as to what complicit actually means," is the reply when Murray points out to his superiors in London that using intelligence gained by torture and signalling that such intelligence will continue tobe in demand is making them complicit in said torture. It's a merciless tale for everyone around, and David Hare leaves you with Craig Murray stating: "They call me a hero now. I'm not. What kind of world have we created where merely being opposed to torture makes you a hero?"

And finally, two recs for Shakespeare fanfiction. I've talked about The Merchant of Venice before, and why it's such an interesting but impossible play. Lo and behold, two stories set in the aftermath, both with Shylock as the pov character, who are very complex; among other things they pull off an extravagant pairing, but what I find most fascinating are the encounters between Shylock and his daughter Jessica, and the slow coming to terms between these two:

A wilderness of monkeys

Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves