THEATRE Back in the USSR


Collaborators COTTESLOE, NATIONAL THEATRE, LONDON


and “should”. Consumers – and, in some cases, reviewers – will complain of a certain play, film or book where they were unsure whose side they were supposed to be on or will admit that they found a scene or character sympathetic or amusing but were not sure that they should. I have never understood this idea of a rule book of approved responses. With rare excep- tions – for example, a play written for children that showed Hitler or Stalin as gentle, mis - understood men – a viewer or reader is responsible for their own reaction to an artwork. The best art is often nuanced and ambiguous, leaving us unsure of our views. If surprised by your response, this may reveal something interesting in either the text or yourself. Collaborators, a provocative new play at


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the National Theatre, is a perfect example of such a piece. Indeed, theatregoers were actu- ally to be heard, during the first-night interval, fretting that “I’m not sure Stalin is supposed to be played like that” and “I’m not sure I should be laughing so much”. A theatrical debut by John Hodge, who is already an accomplished screenwriter (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting), the play is provoked by the documented fact that, in 1938, Joseph Stalin demanded a sixtieth- birthday tribute play at the Moscow Art Theatre. He chose as writer Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The White Guard was much admired by the dictator but whose recent biographical play Molière had been banned, perhaps because it dealt with the French dramatist’s relationship with an absolute monarch. Stalin’s bullying interest in Shostakovich


and Prokofiev has been widely covered in non-fiction and fiction – David Pownall’s hit play Master Class is based on the legend that


(unlucky-in-love innocent from North Carolina seeks to rescue her man from per- nicious cult), thereby prompting the Mirror to find as much dirt (including previous form in what you might call niche sexual services) as they could to discredit their rivals. The film was prompted by McKinney’s bizarre reappearance in the news three years ago in an unconnected incident straight out of pulp science fiction. So what light does it shed on this particular psychology? She is in many ways, as Anderson doubtless discov- ered, irresistible in her combination of intelligence, charm and almost supernatural determination. You certainly wonder what she might have done if she had turned those formidable ener- gies elsewhere. McKinney takes issue with the documentary’s portrayal of her, though.


he two words that make me most uneasy in connection with culture are “supposed”


Simon Russell Beale as Stalin: ‘a highly sophisticated caricature’


dependence can be observed in most societies. The characterisation and


acting are also provocative. Stalin, as written by Hodge and played by Simon Russell Beale, is a shambling, wheedling bumpkin (the actor employs a generalised Borsetshire burr) and frus- trated thespian, although Beale, in astonishing sudden flashes of eye-bulging or


the Soviet leader summoned the composers to the Kremlin for a piano lesson – but his talents as a dramaturge are fresher territory and fascinatingly dramatised by Hodge. Opening with a nightmare sequence in


which Bulgakov is chased around his flat and battered with a typewriter by Stalin, Hodge employs a tone of dark farce that reflects Bulgakov’s own work. With direct allusions to Molière and the


Faustian novel The Master and Margarita, Hodge daringly presents a reversal of roles between tyrant and writer. During joint working sessions with Stalin, the dictator eagerly takes over at the typewriter, scripting a hagiographic version of his rise, while the playwright is left to run the Soviet Union, adding the initials J.S. to demands for increased steel production or investigations of suspected conspiracies. Here, Hodge opens himself to another com- mon mutter from the auditorium at historical plays – that, although the two men did meet, this is not what really happened – but the job- swap is demonstrably a metaphor for the broader theme of the relationship between the artist and the state: the devil’s deal by which leaders seek the approval of intellectuals or celebrities and the creative are often flat- tered by proximity to power. And, though with consequences generally less extreme than in Soviet Russia, this curious inter-


She insists she is not delusional and has turned up at festival screenings in the United States to harangue the proceedings, even instigating a legal case. Morris appears resigned to this and invites her onstage for the Q&A sessions afterwards. If his documentary does not judge her, the


weight of appraisal is more likely to fall on the publications that profited from her with a particularly British sententious prurience evident even in recollection. Did Britain’s newspapers and their readers


make Joyce McKinney obsessive to the point of mania? Hardly. But they certainly made her into a sensation, an instant celebrity ripe for destruction. In their headlines, her journey from eccentric heroine to princess of perver- sion was swift. Francine Stock


Former red-top sensation Joyce McKinney, ‘the most engaging and exasperating of subjects’


12 November 2011 | THE TABLET | 29


anger, clearly shows the madness and danger within. Was Stalin really like this? Such a question would never be asked of a cartoonist and what Collaborators offers is a highly sophisticated caricature of the Georgian monster. Admirers of Bulgakov have objected that Hodge and Alex Jennings (as Bulgakov) make the writer too much the sick and quiescent victim but, again, this seems to me to be interestingly ambiguous: the play Young Stalin is never staged and Bulgakov contributes almost noth- ing to it, which can be seen as canny. Jennings, like Beale, also achieves a power - ful subtlety of facial expression which is more common on screen than in theatre and Nicholas Hytner’s production perfectly serves this close-up acting by using the National’s smallest auditorium the Cottesloe (although box-office logic would suggest at least the mid-size Lyttelton) and placing the stage in the centre of the space, with viewers on all sides. Mark Addy provides classy support as a secret policeman who, like his country’s boss, really yearns to be in theatre. Is this the way the story of Stalin should be


told? Is the story supposed to be as wackily comic as this? Who cares, as long as the his- torical horrors are acknowledged (which they are) and acting, writing and direction are as brilliant as this? Mark Lawson


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