Blood-stained humour

I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe.

The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So Bulgakov takes over Stalin’s day job, running Russia. This inspires many hilarities in the horror-slapstick genre. After reading a forge-master’s report from Kazakhstan, Bulgakov writes in the margin, ‘More steel, or else! J.S.’