In my role as producer-director, I may have overstepped the mark in threatening to shoot your wife

It is a matter of historical record that in 1938, Mikhail Bulgakov—satirist, dissident, famous claimant that "Manuscripts don't burn"—was approached by the Moscow Art Theatre to write a dramatic celebration of the early life of Stalin. It is also a matter of historical record that, although it was never performed, enigmatically praised by its intended honoree and then buried as comprehensively as the rest of the writer's output for the last ten years, Bulgakov wrote the play. It's called Batum. I have no idea if it is supposed to be any good. It seems improbable that it should be, especially when measured against its author's scathing record with Soviet authority—a propaganda piece ne plus ultra, the precise Party-line hackwork Bulgakov had held out against his entire artistic life. In any case, it made no difference. Stalin, who had one time protected the writer personally against arrest and execution, securing him a position at the Art Theatre, yet refusing to approve his passport application or even reduce the ban on publication of his work, did not repeat his famous phone call. Bulgakov died less than a year later, of the hypertensive kidney disorder which ran in his family, partway through the fourth draft of The Master and Margarita and in despair that his work would ever see the light of day. If he had betrayed himself—and The Master and Margarita is a story much concerned with betrayals, Pontius Pilate of Yeshua, the Master of his art—he had done it for nothing.

John Hodge's Collaborators is the play Bulgakov might have written out of his guiltiest fever dreams of this history, a spiky, cartoonish fantasia in which every event has a real-life shadow and the mental contortions by which an anti-authoritarian artist commits himself to legitimizing a tyrant become the twists and turns of a reeling, nightmarishly funny plot of collusion and compromise. It begins in epitome: the playwright bolts up sweating from a recurring dream of a stop-motion, comically scary Stalin pursuing him around his tiny, overcrowded flat to smash his head in with a typewriter. (His wife asks sleepily, "Did he catch you?") Soon the stage is filled with crow-masked commedians and dying Molière, a secret policeman who fancies himself a theater director and his jaw-droppingly dreadful actors, bright stabs of music and whirlwind anxiety tableaux as the acridly satirical mingles with the disturbingly real. Mikhail keeps trying to advise a young novelist whose failure to keep within the bounds of social realism is putting him at increasing odds with the censors, but their conversations are interrupted by the very correct baby communist who lives in the Bulgakovs' kitchen cupboard because there's nowhere else to put him. (The set looks like Constructivism threw itself on a grenade.) The doctor he's dragged to see about his worsening health is a scruffy, manic screwloose nursing a ten-year crush on the actress who did the nude scene in Zoya's Apartment, but there's nothing funny about the nephrosclerosis he diagnoses.¹ And the two are most terribly combined in Simon Russell Beale's Stalin, with the dictator's Georgian accent transmuted to a West Country burr and a ruddy, jovial humor that decoys even the audience into a sense of no more than ordinary danger, as if he were some old-fashioned East End gangster who might send his boys to knock you around a bit, but wouldn't really crush your knees and dump you in the Thames, that's just uncalled-for. It's never that the gloves come off, the shrewd black eyes turn cold, the steel into which Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili recreated himself is suddenly shown. It's the moment you realize it was all there from the beginning, as plain as the pipe in Uncle Joe's mouth, and you never saw it coming. How do you write a play about a tyrant you loathe and fear and despise? You don't; he writes it for you. You just have to sign your name to it.

As you just have to sign his name to these steel quotas. To those grain requisitions. Is that a person's name on the page beneath your little red marker? Just initial it—what's it for again? A confession? Oh, come on, then, make a decision, you don't think the whole bloody USSR runs itself, do you? Our little secret, Mikhail. Next year's harvest or next week's bread. I do not know if Alex Jennings specializes in haunted, compromised artists or if I've just been fortunate enough to catch him as two of my favorites, but his turn as Bulgakov makes me wonder both who he'll play next and what awful thing will happen to him then. The part makes superb use of his talent for looking as though he has his back to a wall, braced against not an external blow, but the something inside that will give way sooner or later in all its shame and confusion; he has something of the same fragility I've mentioned with Peter Cushing, the way he looks so easily woundable, you wait for it to happen. It happens. The point where the playwright is half-curled on the floor after a sudden act of violence, ineffectually shielding his face with the hands he's terrified are about to be stamped on, is less painful than the scenes where he turns defensively on his friends, apologizing the latest brutalities of the NKVD with the wobbly, fast-speaking formality of someone trying to keep a communications blackout between his mouth and his ears. Nightmares aside, the Mikhail we meet first is sardonic, affectionate, passionate, playful, a man with the imagination to think up a six-foot-tall talking black cat and the wit to turn him loose on modern-day Moscow, harassed but not broken, wryly annotating the insanities of everyday Soviet life. As the consequences of his actions pile up around him (sometimes quite literally), he takes on a scraped-out, febrile appearance, losing dimension, blanched brittle as a bunch of fasces reeds even as his clothes smarten, the hot water turns itself on in his apartment for the first time in years and someone has left a pineapple on the kitchen table. The more he's given, the less there is of him. It's the same lesson as Nineteen Eighty-Four, really, the old totalitarian rag: "It's man vs. monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins."

In real life, Bulgakov had the last word—I can buy a copy of The Master and Margarita for $8.75 on Amazon.com and there's nothing Josef Stalin can do about it. He's not remembered as a toady of the Soviet regime, but as one of its chiefest, weirdest critics, and the fantastic conceit that writer met dictator in a secret office underneath the Kremlin to exchange jobs is nothing more than a beautiful literalization of the ambivalence Bulgakov must have felt, thinking himself into Stalin's place in order to write even a little convincingly about him, back-shadowed with the dictator's reported boast, "Our strength is that we trained even Bulgakov to work for us." But we're not years later, while we're watching this play, not in a bookstore with new editions of White Guard or The Fatal Eggs: we're in Moscow and this time the Devil is writing Mikhail. The great trick is, Hodge's is a Devil worthy of him. (The play is funny even after it becomes atrocity. That's hard.) I still hope Bulgakov wasn't thinking anything like Collaborators when he died.

If there's a rebroadcast near you, go see it. Ironically, I'd have had this posted hours ago if Livejournal hadn't been suffering another denial-of-service attack.

1. The character does get maybe my favorite line in the whole production. In their initial interview, it is established that Mikhail trained initially as a venereologist, dealt with a year's morphine habit following his war service, and authored the aforementioned 1928 brothel farce. Their second visit, the doctor blinks blankly at Mikhail and Yelena: "Bulgakov," the playwright repeats patiently, "Mikhail." The doctor slaps the table in recognition: "Smackhead groin doctor and smut scribe!" Mikhail says dryly, "That's me."