In the 1970s, Howard Brenton wrote The Churchill Play, provoking furious newspaper pieces and a testy TV encounter with Melvyn Bragg. In a future (1984) totalitarian Britain, internees at the Churchill internment camp staged a play in which the second world war leader rose from lying in state to endure insults including: “People won the war. He just got pissed with Stalin.”
That reference was to peace conferences from 1943-45, also including President Roosevelt. But, five decades on, Brenton has written about a lesser-known, frequently inebriated August 1942 encounter between the British and Russian leaders at a time when, as Churchill in Moscow presents it, each ally feared the other was about to lose to Hitler.
