It is tough luck on Rajiv Joseph that his play, first seen in Houston in 2017, opens in the same week as an adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, in London. Both works focus on what one of Joseph’s characters calls “the cruel gaze of communism”. Where Grossman’s work stirs the heart, Joseph’s often feels like an intricate riddle that the audience has to solve over the course of three hours.
Joseph starts strongly with a scene set in Poland in 1920. Isaac Babel, a wire-journalist and embryonic writer, speaks up for the power of fabulation: Nikolai Yezhov, a red cavalry captain, puts the case for hard, unimaginative fact. That dichotomy runs through the rest of the play, which gives us a kaleidoscopic, non-linear vision of key moments in Soviet history. Babel’s 1920 diary, with its subversive portrait of revolutionary brutality, threads its way through scenes which embrace Stalin’s purges, wartime paranoia and the steadfast rise of a KGB operative, Vova (ie Vladimir Putin), to a position of supreme power.
If the play proves anything, it is that by the end we have witnessed a total reversal of values: the state itself has now become a machine for propagating lies, while the writer stands for rigorous truth. But while Joseph writes many good scenes – such as one where Babel cunningly seduces Yezhov’s wife and another where a young Putin consumes a Polish soup symbolically composed of blood-sucking leeches – the play lacks a strong narrative drive. Watching it is like going on a journey where you are taken on a number of detours before arriving at your impatiently awaited destination.
Lisa Spirling’s direction, however, keeps you permanently interested and there is an outstanding performance from David Birrell as Yezhov: with his wire-brushed hair and menacing bulk, he becomes the living embodiment of the brutal Stalinesque apparatchik.
There is impressive work from Rebecca O’Mara as his prophetic wife, from Ben Caplan as the persecuted Babel and from Steve John Shepherd as the power-hungry Putin. But while it’s an ambitious play, in the style of Tom Stoppard or Tony Kushner, it is one that teases the intellect rather than rouses the emotions.
• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 9 June. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
