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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
