Only truly great plays survive their time. Alexander Gelman's two-hander - about a family destroyed by the pressures of the Soviet system and its unrealistic five-year plans - may seem rather dated, but it still has something to tell us.
Andrei Gladkov's cry of "I don't get paid for being a husband and a father, you know" has probably echoed around plenty of British family homes in recent decades as jobs have become less secure and more demanding, and the urge to consume more, bigger and better becomes greater. The British, after all, work the longest hours in Europe.
Gelman's play is set in the early 1980s. Gladkov, the manager of a large Soviet industrial building project, is doing well: he has a three-bedroom flat, a phone and a car. But the strain of keeping the books balanced in an inefficient set-up riddled with corruption and cronyism is great. Yet Gladkov is a man with connections and the smug smile never leaves his face - until his wife, Natasha, accuses him of having been responsible for the industrial accident in which their teenage son lost his hands.
Other plays - most notably Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest, in which the pressures of capitalism cause a lorry driver to damage the people he loves most - have dealt with this kind of scenario more effectively, and the way the play is constructed means that the revelation about the son comes as no surprise. But from here on in the drama becomes infinitely more interesting as the slippery Gladkov becomes like a fish speared on the hook of his wife's anger and looking for a way to escape.
As both manoeuvre to seize the moral high ground and gain a psychological advantage, it soon becomes clear that the corruption of Gladkov's workplace has infiltrated their marriage and is symptomatic of a wider infection in a society in which backhanders and personal connections are the only way to get on. Nobody is innocent.
Inevitably, events in the former USSR have superseded the play and it might well have greater impact in a new translation that dared to move it rather closer to home - say to Docklands or Surrey. But Steven James-Little's production fits neatly into the claustrophobic Finborough space, and Andrew McDonald and Fiz Marcus deliver as the mendacious Gladkov and his equally culpable wife, Natasha.
* Until February 3 (box office: 020-7373 3842) then transfers to The Arches (0141-221 4001), Glasgow, from February 8-10.
