The Collaborators, in John Lodge’s black comedy, are Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The White Guard, Stalin’s favourite play and one which it was said he saw 15 times. The National staged it with great success last year. There is a curious empathy between the two men but in any relationship, the monster always wins.
Bulgakov is commissioned by the NKVD to write a play about Stalin, as a present for his 60th birthday, a commission he would prefer to refuse, but dare not. It’s 1938, the time of the Great Purge in which ten million were killed. He is also offered bait: if he writes the play he will be allowed to stage his banned play about Moliere’s relationship with King Louis XIV, but which was really about Bulgakov’s relationship with Stalin, hence the ban. The playwright (with a pistol pointing at the back of his head) finds it difficult to get started. Stalin suggests they swap roles. He will write the play and Bulgakov will run the country.
Lodge’s witty conceit has its flaws but it’s very well acted and Nicolas Hytner’s surreal production, set on a serpentine stage, is very enjoyable. The auditorium, also, has been refigured in a crazy German expressionistic way, so that everything feels out of kilter. Alex Jennings is the fatally compromised Bulgakov who finds anything he tries to do politically for the best only raises the death-toll. Simon Russell Beale’s Stalin is introduced in a nightmare as a commedia dell’arte caricature of a smiling villain; it doesn’t make him any the less chilling. Mark Addy’s NKVD officer is jolly dangerous.