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.