Collaborators, National’s Olivier - review

There’s a pleasing symmetry about the fact that this year’s Olivier Award winner for Best New Play has just transferred into the Olivier auditorium at the National. John Hodge’s amusingly steely-eyed satire about artistic compromise under Stalin’s reign of terror beat odds-on favourite One Man, Two Guvnors but one man who surely didn’t mind the result was Nicholas Hytner, as he directed both pieces.

This Travelex £12 Season-supported transfer from the Cottesloe affords many more people the thrilling opportunity to see two of our very finest stage actors square up to each other. Alex Jennings is Mikhail Bulgakov, a playwright previously in and out of favour with the authorities who is suddenly offered a Faustian pact to write a play celebrating Stalin’s imminent 60th birthday. Simon Russell Beale is a theatre-loving Stalin, who toys dangerously with his favourite captive intellectual.

Bob Crowley’s imposing sloping set suggests the distorted perspective of a dream and so too does Hodge’s script, where fact is hard to distinguish from the fictions boiling in Bulgakov’s increasingly fevered imagination. Stalin, a disarmingly cuddly despot with occasionally chillingly dead eyes, starts to write the dramatic hagiography himself, which leaves Bulgakov to deal with the country’s steel — and assassination — quotas. Russell Beale is deliciously droll but it’s Jennings who steals the honours with his portrait of a touchingly conflicted and vulnerable man who slowly realises that his seeming salvation will be the thing that damns him. A fine collaboration all round.

Collaborators is in rep until June 23 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk).

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