Churchill in Moscow at the Orange Tree Theatre review: bursting with political playfulness
Churchill and Stalin get lost in translation but bond over a shared love of booze and ruthlessness in Howard Brenton’s clever, witty but laboured comedy about the two leaders’ face to face meeting in 1942. With no common language, they rely on female interpreters who initially stumble over unfamiliar idioms, then increasingly finesse their bosses’ aggressive bluster to preserve anti-Nazi unity.
The play is ultimately about power – the women’s presence, and that of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, partially undermines the “great man” reading of history - but the translation schtick makes it underpowered. Though it allows for lots of comic misunderstandings, it means that a lot of the dialogue is laboriously repeated, in English, Russian or gobbledegook.
It’s a pleasure to hear Roger Allam fit his mellifluous tones to Churchill’s familiar cadences, even though his sporadic hesitation over lines on opening night added to the sense that we’re constantly waiting for a punchline or a punch-up. His hangdog, wispy-pated Winston has come to Moscow to confess that Britain can’t open a second front in Europe for another year.
Stalin (Peter Forbes, using a West Country burr apparently comparable to Uncle Joe’s Georgian peasant accent) furiously accuses the Brits of cowardice, while swathes of Russians die defending Stalingrad. Each suspects the other wants to make peace with Hitler. Each foresees the conflict to come even if they unite to defeat him. During a late-night drinking binge involving roasted pig (an anti-capitalist joke) these enforced allies revert to mime, farting and tit-for-tat point scoring.
There’s lots to enjoy here. Informed that the dacha he’s staying in is bugged, Churchill complains loudly about the lack of a gramophone and a bathplug, which then magically appear. The British and Russian translators (Jo Herbert and Elisabeth Snegir) subtly sniff out each other’s secrets – and security clearances – while navigating slang terms like “knackered”. The contrast between the aristocratic imperialist and the proletarian dictator is echoed in Alan Cox’s suave ambassador and Julius D’Silva’s thuggish Molotov.
But there are also a lot of blithely obscure references to Pushkin, Clausewitz and the nihilistic Russian antihero Oblomov, and a lot of shouting and gesticulating from the two leads: their mood swings are never entirely credible. Svetlana (Tamara Greatrex) bobs through the action reading David Copperfield with a comically thick accent, but Brenton has to give her a closing speech about her tragic future life to make her function properly as a symbol of easily-spoiled innocence.
Tom Littler’s production riffs ironically on motifs of Soviet bombast, with the action broken up by bursts of martial music and gnomic scene-headings (“The Devil’s Egg”/“Unfreeze the Tundra”) projected in English and Cyrillic. This adds to the ponderousness. Cat Fuller’s design is lively, though – a fiery sunburst across the floor and walls, adorned with dusty Kremlin sofas and a basin with distinctly un-egalitarian gold taps.
I love the ideas, the political playfulness and the questing humanity of Brenton’s plays but these things often come at the expense of believable characters. I also like the long-term loyalty here: Littler commissioned several Brenton plays at Jermyn Street Theatre, before taking over the Orange Tree. And quite a lot of famous people clearly love both of them.
The first night audience was the starriest I’ve ever seen in a small Zone 4 theatre: David Suchet, Miranda Richardson, Freddie Fox, Mark Gatiss, Chrissie Hynde. Oh, and Nigella Lawson, who I overheard say in the interval that her mother knew Svetlana Stalin: “She lived in Knightsbridge.” Now that would make a good play.
The Orange Three Theatre, to March 3; orangetreetheatre.co.uk
