Vassa
Almeida Theatre, London

In the 1980s, Tom Stoppard, at the behest of the director Peter Wood, turned works obscure in Britain by the dramatists Ferenc Molnár, Arthur Schnitzler, and Johann Nestroy into a run of enjoyable comedies – Rough Crossing, Dalliance, and On the Razzle – at the National Theatre.

But, fun as the productions were, it seemed improbable that the originals could possibly have been so Stoppardian. The new adapter of an old play should ideally give the vintage vehicle a high polish, while keeping the chassis and engine intact, but those smart glosses on foreign models felt so flamboyantly customised that it was impossible to imagine what had rolled out of the showroom.

A similar vision seems to have driven Vassa, a contemporary reimagining of Vassa Zheleznova by the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). Gorky, whose better-known plays in English language theatre are Summerfolk and Enemies, was initially an apprentice of theatre’s great liberal humanist, Anton Chekhov, his political radicalism leading to exile in New York and Capri, before a curious return to Soviet Russia, championed by Stalin, who made him “superintendent of writers”. The bizarre arc of his life meant that Vassa Zheleznova, though written in 1910, was not performed, in a substantially different version, until a quarter of a century later.