Blood-stained humour

I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe.

The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So Bulgakov takes over Stalin’s day job, running Russia. This inspires many hilarities in the horror-slapstick genre. After reading a forge-master’s report from Kazakhstan, Bulgakov writes in the margin, ‘More steel, or else! J.S.’

This quip gets a hollow laugh from those blessed with the ability to overlook the fact that the subject of the joke is ten million corpses. The comedy continues. When the secret policeman (played with indolent charm by Mark Addy) decides to direct Bulgakov’s play himself, he delivers a stream of ironic wisecracks to the writer. ‘As your producer-director, I admit I overstepped the mark when I threatened to shoot your wife.’ That one’s a belter, provided you accept that emptying gun cartridges into the skulls of innocent people is a source of mirth.

The script’s mood is rushed, shallow, jumpy, uncertain, as if unnerved and embarrassed by its own content. And it seems fearful of approaching true emotion or real sentiment. Frenetic bathos is the only register it can find. The wonky, custom-built stage, like a catwalk made of crazy paving, seems to mock the subject matter further.