The President’s Holiday
Hampstead
The Sea
Haymarket
The Vertical Hour
Royal Court
There’s no such thing as a great script idea. Ideas are equally good or bad, what counts is how they’re treated. Take the 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Pretty dramatic, momentous and gripping, I’d say. And here’s Penny Gold to dramatise it. She may well be a Russian analyst, an expert on the intricacies of revolutionary politics and a brilliant diviner of the male psyche but she’s decided to give those specialities a rest.
Shunting the whole nasty business of the coup to one side, she focuses on the Gorbachev family cooped up in their Crimean dacha surrounded by KGB plotters. Decent harmless folk, the Gorbachevs, but they’re more like a family facing a Christmas powercut than the leaders of a vast empire threatened by internal revolt.
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