In this ambitious but deeply flawed mindbender of a play, American writer Jonathan Spector interweaves the stories of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, a fictionalised scion of America’s leading white supremacy movement, and a psychology professor whose wife goes AWOL after running down a cyclist. They’re used to demonstrate that the supposedly logical decisions humans make – and the image we therefore craft of ourselves – are often governed by irrationality, bias or chance.
So, simple festive fare this is not. And it doesn’t land as intended partly because Chelsea Walker’s production is heavy-handed, particularly when it comes to the comically glutinous Russian accents. But also because Spector was heavily influenced by the thinking of Nobel Prize winner and Princeton psychologist Dr Daniel Kahneman, and vast chunks of the play therefore take the form of a psychology lecture.
