WINNER OF BEST NEW AMERICAN PLAY
AT THE OBIE AWARDS 2018

‘A timely vision of how fragile the public understanding of truth can be’ Evening Standard
‘A kaleidoscopic vision of Soviet history’ The Guardian
‘A tangled web of sex, lies and KGB videotape’ The Times
'Ambitious and fantastical’ Mail on Sunday
'Epic and ambitious' Financial Times
'Massively ambitious and intricate… invigorating'  The Independent
'A dazzlingly audacious epic’ WhatsOnStage
‘Intellectual exhilaration’ The Telegraph
‘The conspiracy theorist in me relished it’ Daily Mail
‘The play zigzags magnificently through history’ The Stage

In 1920, the Russian writer Isaac Babel reports on a Red Cavalry campaign in Poland. In 1936, Stalin’s NKVD chief Nicolai Yezhov unleashes the Great Purge. In 1989, a mysterious KGB agent spying on a woman in Dresden falls in love. In 2010, an aircraft carrying most of the Polish government crashes near the Russian city of Smolensk…

This darkly comic rhapsody on Russian themes explores the blurred lines between lies, fiction and conspiracy theories, as it tracks back and forth across 90 years of Soviet and post-Soviet history in search of the genesis of the post-truth world.

Rajiv Joseph is the multi-award winning author of a dozen plays including Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Lisa Spirling returns to direct her seventh production at Hampstead; her work elsewhere includes In Event of Moone Disaster (as Artistic Director of Theatre503), Jumpy (Theatr Clwyd) and Here (Rose Theatre Kingston).