Collaborators is a 2011 play by British screenwriter and dramatist John Hodge about the "surreal fantasy" of a relationship between two historical figures, Mikhail Bulgakov, the prominent Russian writer, and Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union.
[1] The play received its première at the National Theatre, London, on 25 October 2011; Nicholas Hytner directed, with Alex Jennings as Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale as Stalin.
[2] The play has been published in the United Kingdom and in the U.S.[3][4] The story takes place in Moscow in the years 1938 to 1940 and the drama centers around the apartment of Mikhail Bulgakov and his wife Yelena.
[5] The play is a fictional device to examine the conflict experienced by a writer who is trying to portray a recognizable depiction of the human condition in a tyrannical world which systematically represses such expression.
Bulgakov did indeed write a play to order on the life of the young Stalin around the time depicted, entitled Batum, which is regarded by modern critics as stilted and shallow.
While I may question Hodge's arguments, his play has a nightmarish vivacity well captured in Nicholas Hytner's freewheeling production on Bob Crowley's zig-zagging traverse stage.