History triumphs over invention.

A brilliantly acted historical play about two world leaders squaring up to each other outstrips two over-produced versions of Greek mythology, despite their imported Hollywood stars

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WE all have preferences. Mine, I confess, is for plays on public events, which is why the very title of Howard Brenton's Churchill in Moscow at the Orange Tree, Richmond, TW9, whetted my appetite. It turns out to be a compelling, beautifully acted play about the historic first encounter between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin that took place at a pivotal moment of the Second World War in 1942. The meeting is well documented, but, like all good dramatists, Mr Brenton offers his own interpretation of what happened.

The playwright respects the basic facts.

He reminds us that four meetings took place in August 1942 and that Churchill was determined to impress on Stalin that there would be no invasion across the English Channel that year: instead, Operation Torch would attack the Germans in North Africa, opening up a second front in the south. As Roy Jenkins points out in his biography of Churchill, Stalin played a mix of hard cop and friendly cop and, after some notably barbed exchanges, the two men finally reached an accord over a five-hour dinner fuelled by drink and adorned with a suckling pig.

All this is well known, but, in recording the confrontation of two world leaders, Mr Brenton shows their mutual dependence on translation. It is a point that Sir Ronald Harwood made in a 1985 play, Interpreters, on the same theme; Mr Brenton goes much further by showing two high-ranking female interpreters deploying their political skills to soften the abrasive language used by Churchill and Stalin. He goes on to suggest that the two men, for all their obvious differences, had a shared addiction to power, but he makes Stalin's Dickens-reading daughter, Svetlana, a crucial figure and shows her ultimate rejection of patriarchal brutality.