You would think that two hours and 40 minutes of never less than enthralling theatre would deserve an unreserved recommendation.
Writer Andrew Upton - aka the husband of Cate Blanchett - has come up with a version of the Bulgakov's novel-turned-play that educates, entertains and clarifies the chaos that reigned in 1919 Kiev, where Russia's gathering revolution crashed against the First World War.
On this level alone, Howard Davies's production, with its huge interiors of the Turbin family's airy Kiev apartment, the Ukraine capital's near-abandoned Palace, and the claustrophobic basement that runs the entire width of the Lyttelton's stage, is a triumph.
And to dwell on the visual, there is a moment at the end of the first act, by which time the Tsarist loyalties of the Turbins have been established and the eve-of-battle dinner has resulted in the two brothers, one sister (the only female character in a cast of 28) a brace of officers, and a visiting cousin poet all getting skunk drunk, when the apartment slowly recedes as the bare-walled Palace of the second act comes to the fore. It is a moment of exquisite transition. On this level too, with much of the credit belonging to designer Bunny Christie, the evening is a first-rate success.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with why Stalin paradoxically loved a play whose heroes are noble White Guard officers who fought to keep the Bolsheviks out of Kiev.
By the time he saw it on the Moscow stage, censors had removed the scene in which Ukrainian nationalists torture a Jew (presumably because any advantage in portraying Ukrainian nationalists as barbarians was not worth the risk of eliciting sympathy for Jews) and the plot was given a rousing pro-Bolshevik finale.
And maybe Stalin also realised that, although the Turbins are portrayed sympathetically, they are also revealed as defenders of social injustice and a barrier to progress.
"In the shadows behind the fog, I saw the enemy," says Alexei (Daniel Flynn), a White Guard leader and the eldest of the Turbin siblings. It is not the Nationalists, nor the Bolsheviks, but "the modern world" that he fears and fights. What proletariat worth the name could fall in behind such a rallying call?
And yet it is just as easy to see why performances of the play were intermittently forbidden under Stalin. Communism is present only as a sinister, off-stage but ever-nearing force, as unstoppable as red magma. But the Party is also revealed as just one version of a possible future which is being fought for here.
And even more subversively for the red revolution, the Turbins and the White Guard officers who survive the battle scenes, eventually shed their nobility and idealism in favour of a radical conclusion, that there is not much about any of the causes being fought for in Kiev (Bulgakov's hometown) that is worth dying for.
This is Bulgakov's satirical and cynical point. And attached as it is to the absurdity of Kiev's residents having to prove allegiance to any number of utopian futures - communist, Tsarist and nationalist to name but three - each of which is more likely to kill than protect them, the play becomes not so much a cry to arms, but a curse on all their houses. What revolution could tolerate a call for peace? So no wonder the play was banned.
But the problem the play once posed for those whose job was to interpret and censor its message, appears still to be a problem now. Davies and Upton cannot quite decide what brand of humour best suits Bulgakov's satirical edge.
The director and adaptor have been here - that is Russia and the Lyttelton stage - before, with Gorky's Philistines in 2007. On that occasion the tone was decidedly Chekhovian which was exactly right for a play set before the revolution. But with this, their "after" play, Davies and Upton are much less sure-footed.
Anyone walking in at the end of the second act could be forgiven for thinking that the National was staging an adaptation of 'Allo 'Allo, as Conleth Hill's Lieutenant Shervinsky deals with the retreating Germans whose cod accents instantly bring to mind the BBC sitcom. But you can almost feel the production searching for the right tone, for the right level of humour, and Davies being as uncertain about the author's intent as the Soviets were.
A darker take on the humour would have been less at odds with Bulgakov's sobering and, in its way, subversive message - that after all the fighting for different futures, whether Bolshevik or Tsarist, the Turbins just end up being grateful to have any future at all. (Tel: 020 7452 3000)