It is 1942, Hitler and Fascist forces control most of Europe, their army now advancing on Stalingrad. The US has entered the war joining the embattled UK which has survived Dunkirk and the Blitz. The Soviets want the Allies to divert German resources by opening up a new front on the West, but Allied forces are much smaller than the German ones they would meet if they launched a cross-Channel invasion, it wouldn’t make strategic sense.
This is the situation when British PM Winston Churchill flies via Cairo and Tehran for a meeting in Moscow with General Secretary Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR. Churchill has left his own account in his memoirs, but here, Howard Brenton makes us a fly on the wall in this imaginative recreation deftly staged by the Orange Tree’s Artistic Director Tom Littler. Events 80 years ago are known history, but this is a production that captures their urgency, not only full of surprises but full of humour too, wonderfully close-up in this intimate theatre.
Roger Allam and Peter Forbes as Churchill and Stalin don’t offer impersonations but give much deeper characterisations as the descendant of dukes meets the paranoid Georgian peasant. Their backgrounds could not be more different, but both are now powerful figures, both responsible for disastrous loss of life, both full of bluster, though they hide it in different ways.
The leaders would have been supported by their staff, but we only see Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov (Julius D’Silva) and UK Ambassador Archie Clark Kerr (Alan Cox) and, since neither Churchill nor Stalin speak the other’s language, interpreters who are essential and represented her by the fictional Sally Powell (Jo Herbert) from MI6 and Olga Dovshenko (Elisabeth Snegir) from the NKVD. The interpreters play an important role in negotiations, as Sally remarks at one point, “translators are meant to be windows”, but both sides suspect that the other is thinking of doing a deal with Hitler and, as negotiations get hairy, they are briefed by Kerr and Molotov to sometimes translate with discretion rather than accuracy.
The incorporation of translation is beautifully handled so that it doesn’t slow down the drama, and there is a lovely touch in the way that Stalin hears Churchill’s upper class English is suggested. The translators, both in love with the other’s language, provide another view of international relations. At a late night meeting, their bosses dismiss them and, after knocking back the vodka and Georgian wine, continue their exchanges in vivid pantomime to end up agreeing in happy hysterics and the audience with them.
With Churchill installed in Stalin’s dacha, some scenes are punctuated by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana flitting across the stage immersed in reading David Copperfield in English. He introduces her to Churchill, who sees him as thus trying to demonstrate his humanity. Tamara Greatrex is charming in this, her stage debut, though it is not until the play’s coda that we see why she is there.
Cat Fuller provides a simple set that enables quick transitions between scenes: the floor painted with orange rays that could be an explosion or a sunburst around a central disc that can rise to support a laden drinks table or a lavatory washstand with gold taps with a modernist chandelier that can close up. Max Pappenheim’s music and sound ranges from noisy central heating to patriotic anthems, its strange sounds sometimes a reminder that there is a battle being waged that could determine the fate of Europe and a score that momentarily turns convincingly tipsy.
Churchill in Moscow is an insight into critical diplomacy, written with wit and feeling and presenting a picture of people that seems totally real, whether a British ambassador retching up as the Russians keep drinking, a Russian Foreign Minister who did a deal with Hitler now desperate to defeat him, a teenager wanting to know the truth about her mother or the leaders of nations.
This is a production that deserves a longer life. It is currently sold out though there is a booking scheme that may turn up a ticket.