A brilliant, tense, ragged slice of drama: Waiting for Lefty reviewed

A Russian Doll is a monologue about Putin’s campaign to swing the Brexit vote in his favour. It stars Rachel Redford whose Borat accent becomes grating after a little. She plays Masha, a computer wizard and language expert, who works for a firm of hackers appointed to spread fake news ahead of the referendum. Masha uses two techniques. She poses as a British Facebook subscriber and drops scary comments on to her timeline. ‘If we don’t leave the EU, Muslim extremists will flood the country.’ Her other ploy is to share a quiz about bikinis with her female correspondents. If the offer is taken up, the bots can harvest data from the correspondents and from their followers too. These methods seem rather time-consuming and haphazard.

Masha has other problems on her mind. Her father died in an unexplained military accident in Chechnya. And she fears that the Russian secret service are out to bump her off. These stories don’t mesh well with the central narrative. But then the central narrative doesn’t mesh well with itself. Masha knows little of the English language and nothing about British culture. ‘Some of the people are so poor they ride bicycles,’ she says. Her linguistic expertise is limited to her study of Wuthering Heights but somehow she has mastered the complex patois of south London, and she can pose convincingly as a black teenager from Peckham named Zayla. That doesn’t ring true.

Masha’s boss, Jay-Zee, is another puzzling creation. He’s in charge of the drive to make Brexit a reality but he’s not a computer expert and he landed the job because his powerful father pulled a few strings. Really? The fate of Europe and the future of Russia’s foreign policy hang on Jay-Zee’s ability to practise the dark arts of digital propaganda and yet he has none of the relevant skills and his staff regard him as a work-shy buffoon.