Putin: ‘Oi, Europe, you’re a bunch of poofs’

Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the slalom. And a few figure skaters are pirouetting around the rink. Midair daredevils, with their feet lashed to planks of bendy plastic, are performing spectacular twirls and somersaults and crashes. And there are speed freaks on tea trays racing down ice-packed gulleys in tribute to the Hadron Collider. But the real action is off-piste and off-chute. It’s a political grudge match. Two implacable foes are angrily denouncing each other as shameful and perverted barbarians.

The Hope Theatre’s verbatim drama, Sochi 2014, taps into this febrile mood with a documentary history of gay Russia since the collapse of the Soviet empire. At first all was rosy. When the Russians finally emerged from beneath the commie jackboot, they welcomed homosexuality as an emblem of freedom and openness. Gay people could stroll around Moscow hand-in-hand, unmolested, in the early 1990s.