Churchill in Moscow starring Roger Allam at Orange Tree Theatre – review

In 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill headed to Moscow to meet with General Secretary Joseph Stalin in order to form an alliance that will change the course of the war. One is the grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, while the other was born a Georgian peasant. The two men have little common beyond a mutual dislike for Hitler (for very different reasons) and murky records when it comes to human rights: Stalin is openly genocidal while Churchill is more cagey about the people who have died on his watch. The backdrop is tense: the Bolsheviks are struggling to keep the Nazis out of Stalingrad and argue that Britain should enter France directly.

Howard Brenton’s new play, in a neat production by Orange Tree artistic director Tom Littler (the sixth time that they’ve worked together), offers a fly-on-the-wall account of this meeting that’s a little dry in places (at least to someone who isn’t an expert in military history); some of the jokes seem to be a trifle ‘inside’, and the extended drinking sequence is on the indulgent side. What’s most intriguing is the way in which almost every character is half of a double act and has something to learn from their opposite number, for better or worse.

The star casting of Roger Allam as Churchill is a triumph, a portrait of a leader who isn’t used to things not going his way and is certainly cantankerous but not a caricature. It is deduced that Georgia is the Soviet equivalent of somewhere out of the way like Devon or Cornwall and Peter Forbes’ scarily concrete Stalin (he explains that he represents power, not a person), who is seen as a bumpkin by the Moscow elite, speaks with a strong West Country accent. His bluffness and Churchill’s platitudes are an uneasy pairing; when they ditch their interpreters and communicate through drunken charades, they achieve a measure of bonding that occurs through both losing all sense of dignity.

Particularly enjoyable is the scene in which the (fictional) young female interpreters Sally (Jo Herbert) and Olga (Elisabeth Snegir) kick off their heels while the men are getting hammered and start to connect on a human level (“I love Russian, it’s so deep.” “I love English… it’s all over the place.”). Hired for their precision and ability to use language as a “window”, they ultimately deploy their skills to surreptitiously manipulate the situation for the greater good.

Julius D’Silva’s chief negotiator Vyacheslav Molotov is underused, but Alan Cox is quite delightful as the dependable diplomat Archie Clark Kerr who loves his posting but hates the stomach-burning drinking and isn’t afraid to deliver a few home truths to his boss when necessary.

Stalin’s teenage daughter and “little hostess” Svetlana (Tamara Greatrex) is the only character without a double and wanders in and out of the action in a little-girlish cotton frock reading aloud passages from David Copperfield like a bookish manic pixie dream girl. The epilogue shows that she had an extraordinary life and was a great survivor but it feels somewhat tacked on here – perhaps her story will be the focus of a future play by Brenton.