Writer: Howard Brenton
Director: Tom Littler
There has been no shortage of dramas recounting the activities of Winston Churchill during World War II, but, until now, little has been known about the British Prime Minister’s trip to Moscow to meet Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Howard Brenton puts that right with a new play that starts out as a factual account of the visit and then develops into a biting and frequently hilarious satire of all international diplomacy.
It is the Summer of 1942. The planned invasion of Northern France has been delayed, the shipment of arms to the Soviet Union has stopped, and Churchill’s priority has become attacking Southern Europe from North Africa. It has become rather useful to the British that Hitler is deploying troops on the Eastern front, but Stalingrad is about to fall and Stalin is desperate for help. The background to the leaders’ meeting could hardly be more awkward.
Director Tom Littler’s in-the-round production is blessed with glorious performances from Roger Allam as Churchill and Peter Forbes as Stalin. They enter into a gladiatorial combat that shakes the roots and branches of the Orange Tree, bringing out the vast differences between a son of the English aristocracy and a Georgian peasant. Churchill sees Stalin as “a yokel” and, amusingly, Forbes plays him with an English West Country accent.
Churchill is backed up by the sturdy British Ambassador, Archie Clark Kerr (Alan Cox) and Stalin by the hawkish General Molotov (Julius D’Silva), who had previously led a collaboration with the Nazis. Much of the humour in the play arises from mistaken translations, some deliberate and the action focuses on the roles of two translators (Jo Herbert and Elizabeth Snegir), both officers in their respective armies. A fascinating figure hovering in the background is Stalin’s young daughter, Svetlana, played endearingly by Tamara Greatrex. She is doted on by her father who gives her the job of being hostess at a dinner party for their guest, taking over from her late mother.
Churchill is accommodated in Stalin’s private marble-built dacha, bugged throughout. Doubts and suspicions abound as each man challenges the other over past misdeeds. “We don’t murder our enemies, we send them to the House of Lords” asserts Britain’s leader, while his Soviet counterpart retaliates with accusations about atrocities committed under British Imperial rule. Ultimately, the men meet face-to-face, alone and without translators, for a late night vodka-fuelled summit. They yell at each other, neither understanding a single word of what the other is saying and they reach an accord. The playwright has made his point emphatically.
Brenton does not allow us to forget that, along with the Americans, these two guys would go on to carve up Europe and lay the foundations for 45 years of cold war. A sobering epilogue by Svetlana sums up what happened after the joke diplomacy and brings us back to reality, but it is the riotous satire that has gone before that will linger long in the memory.
Runs until 8 March 2025
