I overheard someone at the interval remarking that Anders Lustgarten’s play about the Chinese Communist revolution felt a bit like a socialist Lehrstück, instructing us as to the noble realities of the people’s struggle. It’s actually rather more complex than that: we respond as if it were such a work, because we expect that any play that says positive things about the revolution, and features folk in those olive-green uniforms, is bound to be tendentious and blinkered. (It has to be said, the programme biog’s observation that the play “is a take on [Lustgarten’s] Ph.D. topic” doesn’t help.)

However, the playwright – an accomplished dramatic polemicist – is showing the idealism in order to progress to its betrayal. As he follows the inhabitants of the small fictitious community of Rotten Peach village from 1949 to the present, he suggests that the catastrophic famine of 1959-62 was caused not simply by the top-down diktats of the Great Leap Forward, which destabilised both China’s agrarian focus and its actual practices; rather, the people’s enthusiasm and support of the revolution led them to feel guilty about not meeting fantastical targets, and thus to starve themselves in order to comply. As for today’s totalitarian capitalism (with Rotten Peach due to be rezoned as a business park), it was emblematised for me by the repeated megaphone bellow “Trust the Party!” being delivered by a man in a shiny three-piece business suit.

Steven Atkinson (artistic director of the HighTide festival which will host this production in September) takes the action beyond the stage and up both the main banks of the Arcola’s seating, which means that at some point everyone in the house is unable to see what’s going on. Zippier scene changes would also remove a slight sense of drag. Nevertheless, he and his cast of eight (led by Anna Leong Brophy as the village secretary, Louise May Newberry as a plain-speaking Red Guard and featuring Siu Hun Li as a Scots-accented Mao Zedong) effectively communicate Lustgarten’s thesis that it was the people, not the party, that made the revolution, and who may yet respond to its ongoing distortion.

Written for the Financial Times.