The Death of Stalin (2017)

11.15pm, Sunday, BBC Two

Armando Iannucci has assembled an incredible CV as writer and director – The Thick of It, Alan Partridge, The Personal History of David Copper eld, The Day Today – but The Death of Stalin may well be his nest work. It’s a tricky, tricksy thing, a satirical reimagining of the days and weeks after monstrous Soviet tyrant Stalin died of a stroke in 1952. Iannucci takes the only sane approach to an insane situation, and makes a kind of surreal comedy from this incomprehensibly horri c time and place.

Thus, we have actors – Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, Simon Russell Beale as Beria, Michael Palin as Molotov, Andrea Riseborough as Svetlana – portraying real Russians but in their own accents (and the English language). The lm feels like a pantomime at times, some broad and bizarre slapstick.

Perhaps oddly, it all works really well: this staginess and obvious arti ce make it easier to believe a literally incredible story. Some of the plot has been invented, or at least its details tweaked; but the realities of Stalin’s Reign of Terror were so outlandish, they far exceed any ction.

His acolytes really were too frightened to call a doctor after his stroke, thus inadvertently ensuring his death. He really did force them to sit around watching westerns at all hours of the night. The Politburo really did instruct an entire orchestra to redo a live performance so Stalin could hear it on the radio. History, they say, repeats itself: rst as tragedy, then as farce. Ironically, the tragedy that was Stalinism had the feel of farce all along, and this movie captures that impeccably. But never mind all the political theorising – The Death of Stalin is brilliantly funny, with special kudos to Jason Isaacs’ foul-mouthed Marshal Zhukov and Rupert Friend’s amusingly dissolute Vasily, Stalin’s son. You’ll laugh, and maybe cry, too.