THIS one-woman show might better have been called Stalin’s Daughter Goes Mad in Bristol. The play is based on the period when Svetlana Alliluyeva — Stalin’s daughter — lived in the city during the 1980s and ’90s after defecting from the Soviet Union.

Kirsty Cox is at times electrifying as the psychologically damaged only surviving offspring of the Soviet ruler, who lost her mother aged six when she shot herself in 1931.

This traumatic event appears to be the defining moment that causes Alliluyeva such pain — the cause of her mother’s death was hidden from her for a decade until she saw it reported in a Western magazine.

Unfortunately, though writer David Lane is very good at giving us the sense of Alliluyeva ’s dislocation so far from home and her mental disturbance — with telling details such as her imaginary friendship with “Lelka” and her real one with the local greengrocer — the focus on her deteriorating state of mind feels a little overdone and parochial. Was Alliluyeva really suffering from split personalities, one wonders, or is this dramatic licence?

There are occasional glimpses into her father’s reign, such as when she recalls being dragged in to sing in front of party leaders. But such insights — and her relationship with her parent is surely a big part of our reason to be interested in Alliluyeva — are seen through the heavy fog of her delusions.

The choice of seeing her life in retrospect, amid her new and strange existence in Bristol, might have provided interesting insights into into her relationship with Stalin and the significant global events she lived through. The focus, though, is on the personal as we meet her alcoholic brother Vasili and her first boyfriend and true love Alexei, eventually dispatched to the gulag by her father.

Cox’s performance — glistening eyes, nervous smile, voice high and almost breaking as if she is going to crack up any minute — captures Alliluyeva’s sadness. But where is her intelligence, her imperious Georgian soul? Where is the black humour that every story of suffering requires to lighten the way? And where are the politics — any breath of the latter would be preferable to mere psychology.

The monologue of lyrical madness is well written and there are great lines: “Death was marked on them,” says Svetlana of her father’s children. “Stalin pulled them into this world, his fingers sinking into their heads like the peaches he used to send me.” But they alone are not enough.

Review by Joe Gill