A GREAT TURNING POINT, CAUGHT IN ASPIC
It is 1942. Prime minister Churchill has travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin. Each side has a problem at home with voices wanting to cut a deal with Hitler. The Red Army is struggling against odds to save Stalingrad, and wants Britain to invade France rather than attacking Europe from the South. Churchill knows we aren’t ready to cross the Channel, and needs all his persuasive powers. Face to face the two great, proud, stubborn figures must come to some accord. They won’t get there by berating one another for their records’ flaws in human rights (Stalin’s, of course, blackly murderous, Churchill’s more opportunistically grey).
It is a clash worth imagining, and a new play by Howard Brenton is always an event. Respect to the little Orange Tree for nabbing it to show us first in such tight, in-the-round intimacy, because it’s a thrill: a rich, dense imaginative history play dashed through with savage comic absurdity and streaks of unsettling insight.
It pares down reality, of course: other officials were present but what we see is the two giants, their dutiful interpreters (here made female, Olga from NKVD, Sally from MI6) , plus Commissar Molotov and the suave, elegantly despairing Archie Clark Kerr from the FO. Neither, of course, feels they have much control over their bosses. Oh, and there’s sixteen-year-old Svetlana Stalin, Tamara Greatrex wandering the set reading David Copperfield. She will command a stunning finale, no spoilers.
Know first that Roger Allam’s Churchill is a marvel, well worth the presumable misery of the bald wig. Because apart from that disguise, rather than imitate the too-familiar Churchill he seems in Brenton’s deft text to place himself squarely within the whole man: his background, former disappointments, patriotic sense of ancestry, belligerence and frivolity and appetite and sincerity and dark midnight Black Dog thoughts. Thus it is from that, not from any mimicry, that the slow enunciations , sharp silences and sudden explosions emanate. Whether locking political horns or drinking competitively with Stalin, or (in a memorable moment) briefly conversing with the discreetly perceptive Olga. he is the best stage Churchill yet.
Peter Forbes’ Stalin is impressive too, with a terrifying solidity and, menace under the coarse black wig . Later, in the extraordinary final mutuality of the pair, he deploys enough fearsome paranoia to make you feel for a moment unnervingly what it might be to glimpse inside such a soul. That he and Churchill understood one another’s leadership – up to and including the need for callousness – is made shudderingly credible. There’s a moment when they send out the interpreters and resort to gestures and single word insults, three quarters drunk at a Moscow midnight, which you won’t quickly forget.
But it’s a political play, full of good lines and insights, and the interpreters (Sally Powell and Elizabeth Snegir, a real Russian) matter almost as much. They cautiously make common cause while the men are noisily dining and drinking, admire one another’s language (“I love Russian.. it’s deep” – “I love English, it’s all over the place”). They know all too well that should they deploy it they have the power to soften some of the remarks from their side, to edge doors open rather than slam them. Because somehow, for the world’s sake, alliance must be found between, as the men put it, an English aristocrat and a Georgian peasant. Even if for the moment the only accord lies in both considering General de Gaulle a ‘stubborn prick”.
Tom Littler’s neat, pacey direction shows, as each interpreter leans in to their principal, the difficulties, opportunities and potential disasters of diplomacy’s tricky trade. And there is no shortage of light relief. Some from the cultured Alan Cox as the FO mandarin Archie Clark Kerr, some from Allam’s Churchill , boggling at his host’s “bloody bath taps sold gold. And no plug”.
orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 8 march
rating 5
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