COLLABORATORS

National Theatre/Cottesloe

1938 was not a good time to be living in Russia. It was the time of the Great Purge. Ten million people were killed. It concentrated the mind. Nobody was safe.

When Mikhail Bulgakov was commissioned by the NKVD to write a play about Stalin he wanted to refuse; but with a pistol at his head, he dare not refuse. And he had to think about his wife. The NKVD would have killed her, too. He decided to write about the young Stalin. John Lodge’s black comedy has a basis in fact.

He was rewarded handsomely. Suddenly his apartment had heat and they could all have hot baths. There was good expensive food. There was a car. There was a driver. Things were looking up.

Bulgakov was Stalin’s favourite playwright; he had liked his play, The White Guard, so much that he had seen it 15 times. A curious empathy developed between the two men; but it is dangerous to have a relationship with a monster.

I remember seeing many years ago another good black comedy (David Pownall’s Master Class) in which Stalin threatening to shoot Prokofiev and Shostakovich if they did not write music worthy of Russia.

Stalin, in John Lodge’s surreal fantasy, offers to write the play himself, if Bulgakov will run the country whilst he is doing so. Bulgakov finds that all the good things he tries to do politically end with more and more people being put to death.

The play has its flaws but it is still very enjoyable, thanks to good casting and a witty production by Nicholas Hytner, who sets the action on a serpentine stage in a strangely refigured expressionistic auditorium, which makes everything feel out of kilter.

Alex Jennings is the playwright. Simon Russell Beale is Stalin, a caricature, but not any the less chilling for that. Mark Addy is a jolly dangerous NKVD officer who has ambitions to be a stage director.