The play opens in 1936 when Shostakovich was 30, and his pregnant wife, physicist Nina (Jenna Auger) describes him as “our very own Soviet Mozart!”  His 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk  was initially well received until Stalin condemned it from the audience and Pravda published a damning article which led to the Zhdanov condemnation.  Shostakovich was accused of being a member of the intelligentsia and threatened with imprisonment. 

As a result of the 1936 Purge, Shostakovich’s Fourth symphony was not performed until 1961.  In the play we see it was hidden under the floorboards in his home.  Shostakovich’s response in 1937 was to write the Soviet pleasing Fifth Symphony.  It was his Seventh Symphony which celebrated Leningrad’s resistance during the Second World War against Hitler’s German invasion. We feel throughout the play the pressure on Shostakovich to conform politically and to stifle his own creativity.

By 1946 he is revered and rewarded with a special apartment in Moscow.  Representing a Soviet revolutionary is a young woman Katya (Phoebe Pryce), the daughter of a plumber who appears waving a large red flag and says that Shostakovich’s ballet, “The Limpid Stream” did not give an accurate picture of life in the peasant farms.