The Dragon - reviews of 'oddball' Russian satire

What you need to know

Tangram Theatre company's new adaptation of Yevgeny Schwartz's Stalin-era satire, The Dragon, is playing at Southwark Playhouse. Daniel Goldman directs Schwartz's 1943 play, written in protest against Stalinist totalitarianism but disguised as a fairytale.

The play tells the story of swaggering superhero Lancelot, who decides to save a miserable village from a tyrannical dragon who terrorises them. But Lancelot soon discovers the villagers are complicit in their own suffering. Runs until 10 January.

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What the critics like

The Dragon is "Brechtian, playful and cheerfully rough-edged with a political killer blow" and lots of subversive fun along the way, says Sam Marlowe in The Times. This new version points up the fable's moral lessons with grotesquerie and glee – intelligent, unsettling and ebullient.

"This is unapologetically rough theatre – starkly staged, inclusive, anti-authoritarian," says Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard. It embraces dodgy accents and questionable stereotypes, has a lot of fun weaving pop lyrics and physical comedy into its surreal narrative and at its best it's a funny, provocative show that asks questions about freedom, conscience and responsibility.

Goldman's high-spirited production has "a certain oddball charm and makes the most of meagre resources to tell a tale whose application to our own times – and the war on terror – is neatly made", says Lyn Gardner in The Guardian. Played with the houselights up, this show turns its rough-and-ready execution into a virtue.

What they don't like

There's no fourth wall in Goldman's production, actors stroll among the audience and we're herded onstage and berated, in the play's climactic, impassioned speech, for failing to intervene in events, says Sam Marlowe in The Times. This doesn't feel entirely fair – "our reticence is due to self-consciousness and uncertainty as to what's required of us rather than to moral cowardice – but the point is still powerfully made".