The Stage

Collaborators

Published Wednesday 2 November 2011 at 12:01 by Gerald Berkowitz

John Hodge’s new play belongs to the ‘What If’ school of historical drama, with Hodge deliberately taking his speculations to absurd lengths, paradoxically illuminating reality in ways more realistic guesswork might not.

Alex Jennings (Mikhail Bulgakov) and Simon Russell Beale (Joseph Stalin) in Collaborators at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, London Photo: Tristram Kenton

In 1938, Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a play openly praising Stalin, quite probably, as Hodge suggests, blackmailed with the threat that his other plays wouldn’t be allowed if he didn’t. Hodge then takes the leap of having Stalin not only approve the project but, in secret meetings with the playwright, offer to write the new play himself, Bulgakov filling his idle time by handling a few minor bureaucratic details for the dictator. But the details are not that minor, and Bulgakov soon finds himself complicit in some of the worst purges and mass murders of Stalin’s reign.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Alex Jennings finds the key to Bulgakov in a determined cheeriness frequently built on denial of reality, which makes it easy to blind himself to the implications of what Stalin is getting him into, though Hodge sometimes makes the irony heavy-handed, as when Bulgakov repeatedly finds himself parroting to others the self-justifying words Stalin had used a scene earlier.

Simon Russell Beale’s Stalin is multifaceted without being self-contradictory - gracious, intimidating, enthusiastic, very possibly mad, but also wily and smarter than anyone else around, so that you very quickly surmise that there are bound to be one or more secret intentions behind everything he says, even if you can’t see what they are.

And that characterisation of Stalin as no mindless thug, but an extraordinarily brilliant and clever madman, is the play’s most convincing insight into the reality it observes from its askew angle.