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This latest UK premiere from successful US playwright Rajiv Joseph really shoots for the moon, ambition-wise. It’s a decades-spanning drama, set in Russia, Poland and East Germany, which sets out to interrogate the power of stories by providing – amongst other things – an implied origin story for Vladimir Putin.
And it’s kind of a big mess: the desire to make a big statement is there, but the scope of its ambitions is undermined by lack of conviction and coherency.
‘Describe the Night’ sets out its stall pretty much immediately: in Poland, 1920, Jewish-Ukranian war correspondent Isaac Babel (Ben Caplan) invites Soviet officer Nikolai (David Birrell) to literally describe the night, his point being that neither man will offer up the same description, because there is no objective truth.
We see their lives and those of their descendants as they spread out and jumble up over the next 90 years. Stalin’s purges bite, as does a love triangle between the two men and Nikolai’s wife, Yevgenia (Rebecca O'Mara). But Isaac’s personal diary lives on long after his other works – in 2010 it is unexpectedly wrenched out of the 2010 plane crash in Russia that killed the Polish president and numerous dignitaries.
On the one hand, ‘Describe the Night’ is clearly a story about the power of stories – a fairly common and, I would argue, reasonably boring subject in contemporary drama. Yes, there are hints at the idea that whoever controls the narrative controls reality, something that one might apply equally to Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America, but this is hardly thrillingly rammed home.
On the other, there’s no denying the specificity of its setting – even if Joseph’s depiction of Russia and the Iron Curtain feels vague and Westernised, there are undeniable intersections with reality. The 2010 plane crash did happen. And the latterly introduced character of Vova (Steve John Shepherd) has a very similar bio to noted tyrant Vladimir Putin: we meet him as an ambitious young KGB agent and protégée to an ancient Nikolai in 1988, and again as Russian president in 2010.
Why write such an elaborate yarn about Russia and Eastern Europe? Well, I suppose the region’s rich and difficult history of censorship, storytelling and myth-making is a fertile ground for a more universal analogy. Again, one might easily find some echoes in contemporary America. But I also couldn’t help but think this part of the world represents an easy ‘other’ for Joseph to write about: god knows lurid theories about the 2010 crash run deep in Poland, but there’s something disappointing about the seeds of conspiracy Joseph plants around the tragedy for his own dramatic purposes. I wonder if he’d have had the nerve to do the same for an American disaster.
There is still something impressive about the ambition, and maybe a different director would have made something a bit more coherent out of it all. But Lisa Spirling’s production is all over the shop, veering from melancholy to high comedy with little emotional logic. The cast are largely decent, but there are moments of clanging hamminess as they attempt to find the right pitch for the giddier scenes.
Stories can be the most powerful force on earth. But only if they’re told well.