Politics and Art Collide in ‘Stalin’s Master Class’

Politics and artistic expression collide when “Father of the People” Joseph Stalin and Soviet cultural minister Andrei Zhdanov summon composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich to the Kremlin for a “music lesson.” Odyssey Theatre Ensemble founding artistic director Ron Sossi directs Stalin’s Master Class, a comic expose by British playwright David Pownall. 

As we learned from the Khrushchev revelations in the 1950s, Stalin and the bureaucracy he represented, arising in the 1920s, reversed enormous social and political gains of the revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky.

Among them was a reversal of the right of scores of national minorities within the Soviet Union to self-determination, retreat on women’s rights, instituting a brutal forced collectivization of the peasantry and a subordination of revolutionary movements around the world to the needs of the “Great Russian Fatherland.” The democracy, political debate, free artistic and literary expression, like the Avant-Garde movement, was all destroyed as Stalin exiled, murdered or sent to Siberia thousands of revolutionists, writers, artists; in essence all opponents of his repressive regime.

Can or should artistic expression be forced to conform to political ideology? In this funny but realistic satire, Pownall portrays an encounter of great composers — Prokofiev (Jan Munroe) and Shostakovich (Randy Lowell as) are subjected to the rant and bullying of Stalin (Ilia Volok) and Zhdanov (John Kayton), who accuse the composers of anti-democratic, “formalist” musical tendencies that are alien to the Soviet people and their artistic tastes. “Music that could make a whole population sick!” Stalin believed that the great composers’ music was bourgeois, a similar position taken by Mao Tse Tung in China, and that somehow there is only a proletarian culture of red flags and only “revolutionary” art. This is refuted by the openness of the Cuban Revolution.

In Master Class, you see a side of Stalin that is very patriotic, a man who wants to resuscitate his country. He wants to get these guys to write music that is more accessible and comforting to the sad survivors of the devastating World War, the children and the old people.

David Pownall (1938–2022) was an award-winning British novelist and playwright who had over 80 radio plays broadcast on the BBC and worldwide, and his work for stage has been produced in many countries throughout the world. During his extensive career, Pownall wrote in a number of different mediums including 13 novels. Written in 1983, Master Class was his best-known play.

Pownall said that, in writing Master Class, he wanted to convey the feelings of horror and mockery he felt after reading the minutes of the 1948 Moscow Composers’ Conference. Although the meeting imagined in the play never took place, that conference and other events demonstrate only “too depressingly real” the dictates instituted by Stalin and other bureaucrats, the antithesis of the Bolshevik party objectives.

Ron Sossi founded the Odyssey Theatre in 1969 to demonstrate that experiment-oriented theater could have populist appeal and be fiscally solvent while maintaining the highest artistic standards, and he has led the company as its artistic director for its entire 55-year history. 

Stalin’s Master Class: Performances on Fridays are Pay-What-You-Can (reservations open online and at the door starting at 5:30 p.m.) 

Time: 8 p.m., Wednesday, Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m., Sunday till June 2.

Cost:  $20 to $40. Previews are priced at $15.

Details: 310-477-2055; OdysseyTheatre.com.

Venue: Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles