The newest instalment in the NT Live series, which delivers to the screen recordings of live performances from one of London's best theatres, is a play by John Hodge, who wrote Danny Boyle's early hit films including Trainspotting and Shallow Grave.
It's based in historical fact: in the 1930s, Soviet Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov appealed to Stalin for redress after his work was banned by party apparatchiks. He received it, too, after a fashion, getting a job at the Moscow Art Theatre, though it did him little good: his career languished, although posterity has judged him kindly.
We also know that his last play was a hagiographic version of Stalin's early, activist years but it was never produced either. And the playwright spins off these events to create a bleakly funny, faintly Kafkaesque satire in which the writer strikes a Faustian deal with the dictator. In Hodge's version, Bulgakov and Stalin hold a series of secret meetings in which Stalin writes the play about himself while Bulgakov works his way through Stalin's bulky inbox, initialling authorisations whose horrible significance only slowly becomes clear. Thus the artist is doubly compromised.
The idea is hardly original but Hodge's quickfire script, full of lacerating wit, conjures a real sense of dread, mostly because the words are delivered with a disarming blend of bonhomie, even buffoonishness, and genuine malice. The Full Monty's Mark Addy as the secret policeman pulling the strings is exemplary in this regard, but the stage belongs to Beale - the memorably foppish lead in London Assurance earlier in this series - whose Stalin is by turns a muddled uncle chewing a Cornish accent and a pop-eyed jokester who may just be as mad as a snake.
It's intensely, even claustrophobically stagebound, this show - the entire set is barely larger than the hall and lounge of a suburban house - but the stagecraft is sensational: characters materialise from the darkness; scenes dissolve into one another; and the tiny set's uneven floor gives a good sense of the characters' uncertain world.
