Roll up, psychos

Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a successful screen-writer, to audition his wife for a movie. Isaac improvises a scene with the wife and then fondles her bottom as they perform a weirdly sexless dance that is supposed to symbolise something, but it’s unclear what because everything that preceded the dance was indecipherable. Then the interval.

I looked for enlightenment in the programme notes and discovered what the play is supposed to be about. It’s fascinating stuff. Nikolai Yezhov was a sadistic bisexual midget, dubbed ‘the poison dwarf’, who worked as Stalin’s chief torturer. His wife became the lover of the writer Isaac Babel in the 1930s and when Yezhov discovered their affair he had a rather delicious problem on his hands.