By David Pownall. Directed by Evan Frayne. Produced by the Ensemble Theatre Company. At the Jericho Arts Centre on Wednesday, July 19. Continues until August 16

In 1948, legendary composers Sergei Prokofiev (Chris Robson) and Dmitri Shostakovich (Chris Lam) are called to the Kremlin for an audience with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (Tariq Leslie) and his right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov (James Gill). In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet regime has brought other art forms to heel, and now Stalin and Zhdanov are bent on improving Soviet music and seeing “its present faults liquidated”.

In a drunken late-night meeting, the despot and his sidekick alternately cajole and browbeat the composers. They accuse them of being, among other things, too formalist, too cowardly, and too gay.

The script, written in 1982 by British playwright David Pownall, is a puzzling one. It’s exceptionally wordy—this production ran two hours and 20 minutes, excluding the intermission. Pownall seems to have made the new novelist’s classic mistake of beginning the play too early—the entire first half feels like exposition.

And then there’s the question of power. The dynamism of drama often comes from the way power shifts among characters, within a scene and throughout a story. Look no further than Game of Thrones for examples of this—John Snow and Sansa, Arya and the Hound, and so forth. Yet in this production of Master Class, the power never budges from Stalin. The composers are cowed, unfortunate saps from the play’s beginning to its end.

This dramatic stasis isn’t helped by Evan Frayne’s direction and Lauchlin Johnson’s set. The set is a kind of Chekov’s rummage sale, with the actors shuffling around the furniture like window-shoppers. The performers spend almost the entirety of the first act squashed by the furnishings into about 12 square feet downstage. Given the script’s specificity and verbosity, I wondered if a much sparer and more abstract staging, doing away with the trappings of a Moscow salon, might have freed up the play and players.

At its heart, Master Class is a character study of an aging, capricious Stalin. Tariq Leslie rises to the challenge. His Stalin, getting increasingly schmozzled on vodka, first prowls and then teeters around the room, the ultimate schoolyard bully. He goes from brusque despot to the sloppy drunk bro at the frat party, and we’re convinced by his descent.

But why produce this play in 2017? The obvious connection to make is with President Trump, but I saw little of the orange-skinned billionaire in the text or Leslie’s performance. And I wouldn’t list government censorship of the arts as a hot-button topic, at least not in Western countries.

Ultimately, Master Class is a heavy lift for the audience. It’s long and humourless, with a verbose despot at the heart of it. It’s also art about art, which is often about as fun as hearing about other people’s dreams.