Theatre: The mad, bad and terrifying world of Stalin

Back in the USSR, it was hard to know which was worse: to be on the receiving end of Stalin's criticisms or of his phone calls. Paul Taylor celebrates the censored career of Mikhail Bulgakov.

Letter to Brezhnev was the name of a cheery British film of the Eighties that brought a pair of Liverpudlian chicken-gutters into romantic collision with a couple of Russian sailors. A Phone Call from Stalin - a rather more daunting proposition - would be a good title for any biopic about the brilliant playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). Such a movie would bring into collision a genius and the fickle, ruthless power of Soviet despotism.

In 1930 - in an act that was more a self-serving, artfully misleading propaganda coup than a gesture of kindness - Stalin picked up the receiver and made direct contact with Bulgakov. This was in reply to an impassioned letter in which the playwright outlined his frustration at the systematic way his efforts to be published or staged had been thwarted over the years. He presented himself as a crucified contradiction in terms: a man compelled towards satire in a state where the very idea of satire had been ruled out. "Am I thinkable in the USSR?" he asked, before concluding that the only solution would be expulsion for both him and his wife.

Bulgakov was, it can't be denied, imaginatively drawn towards his persecutor. As Nicholas Wright has eloquently put it, his insight into arbitrary power "amounted almost to rapport, like the relationship between the tyrant and the truth-teller you find in folk tales". For characteristically perverse reasons, Stalin had been a stout supporter of Bulgakov's early successful play The White Guard, a work set against the chaos of the Civil War and Communist revolution.

The censors had balked at what they regarded as the too sympathetic portrayal of a White counter-revolutionary family. Stalin, however, took the line that the play showed an intelligent and powerful enemy. "That is good. We must show the enemy as he is." Then, with a philistine deafness to the tone of this much-hacked-about piece, he declared that it constituted "a demonstration of the all-conquering power of Bolshevism". Which is a bit like saying that Hamlet is a demonstration of the all-conquering power of Norway.

But Stalin was the reverse of a fan of Bulgakov's stage masterpiece Flight, banned in 1928 as an "anti-Soviet phenomenon" and tomorrow receiving its belated British premiere in the Olivier, directed by Howard Davies. People in this country are familiar with Bulgakov mostly through The Master and Margarita, the posthumously-published proto-magical-realist novel that sends an elegant Devil on a visit to 1930s Moscow and becomes a powerful meditation on the survival power of manuscripts in a regime of terror.

Theatre-goers too have had the chance to see two Bulgakov plays courtesy of the RSC: The White Guard (in a late-1970s production starring Juliet Stevenson and Patrick Stewart) and Moliere (starring Antony Sher), in which Bulgakov's position as a writer under Stalin is mirrored in the French dramatist's relations with the Sun King, Louis XIV, and his fall from favour through the machinations of a religious cabal out to wreak revenge for his freethinking, anti-clerical comedy Tartuffe. More recently, the National staged an adaptation of Bulgakov's Black Snow, a late, very funny roman a clef that charts his love-hate relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre, where he worked for a decade as a result of that phone call from Stalin and where his plays were subjected to gross mistreatment - months, sometimes years of rehearsal, followed by abortion or, at best, mangling at birth, then infanticide.

The laugh in Black Snow, though, is very much on the MAT's boss Stanislavsky. In one hilarious sequence, the groaning, hypochondriacal despot is seen rehearsing to the rigid dictates of his famous Method, forcing some poor actor to cycle round and round in a manner indicative of his love for an adjacent woman. "Empty," declares the dissatisfied maestro. "You were riding emptily, instead of being filled with your beloved."

Yet, if Bulgakov is no unknown over here, there's still a thrill of uncertainty at the National about whether audiences will be ready for Flight. Subtitled "A Play in Eight Dreams", it's a phantasmagoria that keeps tragi-farcical track of the White army and ill-assorted refugees as they blunder around in ignominious retreat from the Reds, flee into exile in Constantinople and Paris; and then - in a bitter-sweet coda - feel the nostalgic magnet of Mother Russia pulling them into a possibly suicidal return. It requires a huge cast and a huge stage.

"I said to Howard Davies, 'This is a combination of Albert Speer and Steven Spielberg'," recalls the play's adapter, the Ulster-born dramatist Ron (Rat in the Skull) Hutchinson, and he should know because he is currently on a two-year contract with Spielberg's Dreamworks. The cinematic quality of this "Big Dissolute Symphony" - its heady profligacy with resources, its use of fades and sound dissolves from one "dream" to the next - mark it out, for Hutchinson, as the work of a man who had been "exposed to that first real wave of narrative-driven movies".

It's also the work of a man who, recalling life in his native Kiev in the turbulent days of revolution and civil war, could comment dryly: "The inhabitants of Kiev reckon that there were 18 changes of power. Some stay- at-home memoirists counted up to 12 of them; I can tell you that there were precisely 14; and, what's more, I personally lived through 12 of them." What Hutchinson, in a marvellous phrase, calls "the suddenness and insouciance" of Bulgakov's dramaturgy stems from this experience of being on the wrong, cocked-up end of history.

Flight plunges you into a world gone bananas, where, as Hutchinson says, "all these characters are walking around with one of those cartoon anvils - 20 lbs - over their heads and, as soon as they say anything, Bang! something lands on them." It's a stunned universe where "nobody knows what happened three afternoons ago", where a paranoid deputy trade minister can deny all knowledge of his wife, who consequently wanders the earth saddled with the unjust reputation of being a Bolshevik spy; and where craven generals hang anything that moves and then are haunted by hanged men.

Hutchinson loved the technical and moral daring of the piece - the way it conveys "the casual way in which life is disposed right, left and centre", without coarsening into heartlessness. "It take the audience on a literal journey, but also on a box-of-tricks journey. Bulgakov says, 'What about a cockroach race? All right, damn it, we'll do it'."

He means a sequence in the Constantinople "dream" where the Russian emigres make money and create a diversion for themselves by organising cockroach races and taking bets from the locals: "Please place your bets. The favourite pastime of the court of the late Tsar and Tsarina, never before seen outside the walls of the imperial residences". When I ask how they intend to stage this episode, Hutchinson recalls once having seen a playscript in which "a cockroach had, on command, to run up a character's arm, round his neck and down his other arm. I'd have paid pounds 25 to see that any night of the week."

Stalin condemned Flight as an attempt to stimulate pity "for certain sections amongst the most contemptible anti-Soviet emigres" and people within the Moscow Art Theatre would have been happy if Bulgakov's refugees had wanted to return not for deep sentimental reasons - the sight of the Nevsky, the exhilarating experience of feeling cold again - but because they had seen the error of their ways and now longed to live in an improved and morally improving society. The play was not performed in the USSR until 1957, well after its author's death.

But the Soviet dictator was to dog Bulgakov to the bitter end. In his final year, the harassed, censored dramatist was presented with the dreadful dilemma of being asked to write a play to mark Stalin's 60th birthday. How could he oblige and keep his integrity? By composing a play that dealt with Stalin's leadership qualities early on in his career? At all events, the result, Batum, did not meet with the dictator's approval and the nervous strain effectively destroyed Bulgakov's health. The whirligig of time has happily brought its revenges. The statues of Stalin have been pulled down, while on the page and on the stage Bulgakov lives on.

'Flight' opens tomorrow at the RNT's Olivier Theatre. Booking: 0171-928 2252