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British playwright David Pownall imagines a chilling encounter in which composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich are subjected to the rant and bullying of Josef Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s self-important cultural commissar. Stalin and Jdanov, reveal anti-democratic, formalist musical tendencies, alien to the Soviet people and their artistic tastes. Music that could make a whole population sick! Should one start writing music in the style ordered by the Master, or should one continue to do as one pleases, and risk death?

It is January 1948, somewhere in the Kremlin. There is a piano, vodka of course, and peanuts...