COLLABORATORS JOHN HODGE: National Theatre — Cottesloe Theatre

In Collaborators, the prominent, dissident Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov is coerced by Joseph Stalin into writing a play to celebrate the dictator’s 60th birthday. In return the authorities will allow Bulgakov’s play Moliere to be performed. The resulting Faustian pact is played out in a surreal and increasingly dark drama, in which Stalin becomes the author, and Bulgakov finds himself signing off Stalin’s government papers. The set-pieces with the typewriter and the documents authorising the purges are surrounded by images of Stalin’s Russia — the dispossessed aristocracy, leather-coated secret police, and food shortages. Simon Russell Beale wonderfully captures Stalin’s wily rusticity, ruthlessness, and deadly paranoia, while Alex Jennings’ elegant and anxious Bulgakov is hopelessly trapped by the imperative for complicity and the inevitability of betrayal. In the fantasy, his collaboration puts food on the table and halts the progression of his chronic renal failure, but for only as long as the pact remains intact.