Back in the USSR, with a youthful Vladimir Putin
THEATRE occasionally takes a tilt at British and U.S. politicians, especially ones called Boris or Donald, but it seldom attacks hostile presidents.
Rajiv Joseph’s wideranging Describe The Night prompts us to wonder what Vladimir Putin was like when he was a young KGB officer.
Was he a shrewd man of destiny? Or a ruthless oddball with a hang-up about his mum and a warped devotion to the state machine? Might he even have produced an illegitimate son?
Mr Joseph’s play, not entirely fictitious, spans 90 years from 1920. It has a complicated plot involving 20th- century Jewish writer Isaac Babel and his Army friend Nikolai, who rises to become Stalin’s intelligence chief.
Isaac seduces Nikolai’s wife Yevgenia and they produce a daughter who, by 1989, is a young woman aching to flee communist Dresden for the West. Nikolai, by now 94 yet still somehow running a Soviet surveillance warehouse, sends KGB recruit Vova ( ie Vladimir Putin) to Dresden to stop the would-be defector.
The plot has its farfetched moments. There are scenes of fortune-telling and other lurches into absurdism. The range of years means some actors must play their characters at wildly different ages.
Rebecca O’Mara, as Yevgenia, overdoes things in her granny persona. Steve John Shepherd’s Vova wears a rivetingly bad wig in earlier years. At almost three hours, it makes for a long evening. Yet the show has its moments. Mr Shepherd could be auditioning for the next Bond film villain. Whenever Ben Caplan is on stage playing the eloquent Babel, the story grips. David Birrell brings a mad intensity to Nikolai in the first scene. The conspiracy theorist in me also relished it when the plot referenced the 2010 Smolensk air crash in which the Polish president and other senior figures died en route to the 70th anniversary commemorations of the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 22,000 Poles. Was Moscow involved in that air crash? Surely not. But a playwright has licence to let his imagination roam, as Mr Joseph’s does here.