It was the title of the play that won me over. The moment I saw it on the list of shows to be put on in Easter term, I was intrigued and immediately signed up to review it. However, to my disappointment, the show itself has absolutely nothing to offer to live up to the expectations its spectacular name generates.

Don’t get me wrong, the show is entirely what it professes to be – it is indeed a teenage angsty romcom that does feature a certain concern for Stalin, considering that the Extended Project Qualification question that propels the main action of the play forward is connected with this exact historical figure.

What is misleading is not the title, but our own suppositions. With a title like that, one would expect the play to be a parody of both rom-com-esque love triangles and contemporary teenage culture. That is what it attempts to achieve, considering the level of crude mockery the show is based on. However, the writing falls miles short of what it aims to be and, unfortunately for all the people who’ve put a tremendous effort into bringing it onto the big stage, no amount of theatrical skill can possibly resurrect something that wasn’t alive in the first place.

“What is misleading is not the title, but our own suppositions.”

The main problem that the show suffers from is that in its unsuccessful process of parodying the ‘trashiness’ of teenage culture, it becomes this very ‘trash’. Hence, it isn’t really a parody but a poor imitation of what it is trying to mock. Instead of exposing the banality of the jokes we used to laugh at in our recent teenage-hood, it is asking us to laugh at these same gags from a few years ago – only now on top of being flat they also are outdated.

It follows a typical, beaten black-and-blue story of love triangle confusion and, by doing so, the play is winking at us in the most obvious of manners, barely refraining from screaming at the top of its lungs: “See what I did there? See?” However, we all know that just because you tag it with a label that says ‘irony’ on it doesn’t mean it automatically becomes that.

With the popularity of this particular genre, it is often easy to forget that parody is a highly sophisticated mode of writing, in which an insightful cultural analysis is delivered with a great deal of subtlety under the guise of somewhat obvious mockery – here, however, underneath the pile of cheap gags we were forced to plough through, there was, to the disappointment of our vain anticipation, no deeper meaning whatsoever. In many ways, it was plainly childish – one can respond to a mean comment by coming up with a clever comeback or by simply repeating it back in a foolish voice – and if parody in this metaphor is the former, think of this play as the latter.

What I took particular offence at was the disrespect that this play tried to smuggle on stage under the guise of relatable nostalgia to the formative teenage years of our generation by reducing that time of our lives to a cringeworthy mess of outdated cultural references. I may be sentimental, but if you feel like your teenage years can be summarised by a joke about Minecraft or, even worse, a gag about Sherlock fanfiction, apparently the pinnacle of humour, then maybe this is your cup of tea. But it definitely wasn’t mine.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the play accepted its place in the lowest ranks of humour and branded itself as just that, but it didn’t stop there. Closer to its conclusion, the play attempted to take on a heart-warming coming-of-age aspect by reiterating the same old cliché moral we have encountered hundreds of times (probably with no exaggeration here) in the most overplayed of plots – don’t manipulate people for your personal gain, care about others, love your... But I don’t think we could even pretend to care at this point.

“If you feel like your teenage years can be summarised by a joke about Minecraft or, even worse, a gag about Sherlock fanfiction, apparently the pinnacle of humour, then maybe this is your cup of tea.”

The characters, quite unfortunately, also seemed to have been made of the thinnest, flattest cardboard. A nerd? A manipulative girl? A More Attractive Girl Than You? That’s her actual name from the script, by the way. At least, the characters themselves don’t pretend to be anything more than stereotypes.

Transitions were too fast with nothing happening in between them except some narrative points popping up to help move the plot devoid of any depth or meaning forward. Perhaps that’s why the play with a pace like that seemed like it was dragging on and on and on. There was no real exploration or development of either characters or relationships and the revelations and resolutions that are present are only there because that’s what happens in cliché rom-coms, right? The logic seems to be that we all know the story and hence character development is somehow redundant.

The music played during transitions, which consisted solely of the Soviet anthem played over and over again, also felt like it didn’t quite fit with what was happening in the play. It seems to have been inserted only because we were promised Stalin’s Russia by the title, and therefore Stalin’s Russia must have, at any cost, been delivered to us, regardless of whether it is or isn’t completely out of place.

Subverting the genre of the Teenage Rom-Com: Stalin’s Russia: A Teenage Rom-Com

The only silver lining to this thundercloud is the actors who did an absolutely amazing job at trying to pull the script out of the bottomless pit it had dug for itself. Unfortunately, not even their dazzling talent and incredible effort could achieve this impossible feat