Orange Tree theatre, London
There are laugh-aloud gags and spiky dialogue as Roger Allam and Peter Forbes star in Howard Brenton’s play about the 1942 encounter

In the 1970s, Howard Brenton wrote The Churchill Play, provoking furious newspaper pieces and a testy TV encounter with Melvyn Bragg. In a future (1984) totalitarian Britain, internees at the Churchill internment camp staged a play in which the second world war leader rose from lying in state to endure insults including: “People won the war. He just got pissed with Stalin.”

That reference was to peace conferences from 1943-45, also including President Roosevelt. But, five decades on, Brenton has written about a lesser-known, frequently inebriated August 1942 encounter between the British and Russian leaders at a time when, as Churchill in Moscow presents it, each ally feared the other was about to lose to Hitler.