Bor­is and Stephan are guard­ing their Great Lead­er as he takes his cus­tom­ary mid-morn­ing nap. He’s over­slept and is due at a brief­ing. Should they wake him up? The Great Leader’s Wife says yes. The Great Leader’s Gen­er­al says no. As time ticks on some­thing has to give…

From a simple premise the new play from Joe Musaph­ia explores an absurd yet plaus­ible situ­ation that demon­strates how easy it is for a change in cir­cum­stance to become the new nor­mal. It’s clear that the two guards, Bor­is (Simon Leary) and Stephan (Andrew Pater­son) had very dif­fer­ent lives before the Great Lead­er came to power. While Stephan is a true believ­er, Bor­is is more cyn­ic­al about the roles both of them now play. Under dir­ec­tion by Gav­in Ruther­ford this char­ac­ter­isa­tion mani­fests itself in a twitchy nervous­ness from Pater­son while Leary is a cool­er per­sona who deliv­ers his lines with spite­ful rel­ish. I really enjoyed the slow deteri­or­a­tion of their pro­fes­sion­al­ism and the swings from subtle to overt phys­ic­al com­edy and back again. The action takes place on sump­tu­ous red and black set (designed by Ian Har­man) that includes giant doors, long draped cur­tains, crossed flags and paint­ings in the style of Soviet era pro­pa­ganda posters (fea­tur­ing some famil­i­ar faces from oth­er Circa shows). Cos­tumes by Shelia Hor­ton are crisp neat suits which allow for lapel smooth­ing and much shoot­ing of cuffs as the guards try to steer a course between dis­aster and total dis­aster.

The web­site descrip­tion of the play invokes Tom Stop­pard, Armando Ian­nucci and Monty Python. It does feel slightly out of this time – two men on stage, snip­ing at each oth­er with words, occa­sion­ally doing a phys­ic­al com­edy routine. I think I enjoyed it all the more for that reas­on.