A Mirror
Almeida | ★★★★✩

If you go to the theatre in a dictatorship such as Belarus there are broadly two kinds of show on offer: those that the government condones and those that will get you arrested for watching or staging them.

Sam Holcroft’s new play replicates one of the ruses used by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) when illicitly putting on plays in their own country. It involves everyone present including the audience pretending they are at a wedding.

When the coast is clear the ceremony stops and the play starts. There is something uneasy about this vehicle being used here, even by a playwright as good as Holcroft, who has been away from the stage since her dizzying Rules for Living at the National in 2016.

A Mirror Almeida Theatre Micheal Ward

Micheal Ward (Photo: Marc Brenner)

If you want to give audiences in this country a taste of what it is to live under an oppressive regime, the idea that a British playwright will do it more authentically than BFT themselves — who regularly stage productions in exile in the UK — smacks of arrogance.

Still, Holcroft and director Jeremy Herrin thrillingly deploy the deception techniques of underground theatre in an evening that keeps the audience off balance for two uninterrupted hours.

Uninterrupted that is except by occasional coded warnings that the police may be close, at which point the actors snap out of the subversive event everyone has gathered to perform or watch and back into the ritual of marriage until the coast is once again clear.

This already multi-layered evening deepens yet further when the play-within-a-play spawns yet another. No wonder director Jeremy Herrin has compared A Mirror to Russian dolls.

The excellent cast is led by Jonny Lee Miller who is terrifically supported by Tanya Reynolds (Sex Education) and the quietly charismatic Micheal Ward (Top Boys) in his theatre debut.

A Mirror Almeida Theatre Geoffrey Streatfeild

Geoffrey Streatfeild (Photo: Marc Brenner)

The narrative that dominates the evening is the one were Miller’s wedding registrar becomes Celik, head of the Ministry of Culture while Reynolds and Ward segue from fake bride and groom to respectively play Celik’s new PA Mei and budding playwright Adem, who has sent his first script to the Ministry for approval as all playwrights must.

We soon learn that the work attracted red flags from the censors and a recommendation that Adem be arrested and sent to a “re-education” camp. But Celik regards himself as a civilised man among his regime’s philistines. In Adem he sees potential where others see subversion and an unpatriotic talent for reflecting his country exactly as it is.

Here A Mirror feels spot on. Nearly ten years ago I reported from Moscow for another paper on Russia’s contemporary playwrights.

Even then they were being condemned as “unpatriotic” and “pro-Western” merely for reflecting their country as they saw it.

Under the then Celik-like Minister for Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, who recently produced a book for Russian schools which teaches that Putin saved civilisation by invading Ukraine, any playwright whose work was unflattering about Russian society was seen as enemy of the state, just as Adem is.

A Mirror Almeida Theatre Tanya Reynolds and Micheal Ward

Tanya Reynolds and Micheal Ward (Photo: Marc Brenner)

With his hands threateningly gloved and a smile that never reaches the eyes, Miller’s intense Celik has something of a sinister Steven Berkoff about him while Reynolds as the crushingly diffident then steely Mei is also superb.

You could argue this show reveals nothing about authoritarian regimes that is not already widely known.

But with freedom of expression under more threat in this century than ever before, someone has to remind us what we have to lose. Holcroft does it with wit and invention.