If only a fraction of the stories that swirl around the death of Grigori Rasputin are true, the assassination of the Russian mystic by a conspiracy of noblemen could be described as amateurish at best.

A failed poisoning, multiple gunshot wounds, beatings and suggestions that Rasputin may only have actually died by drowning after he was rolled up in a carpet and hurled off a bridge – this is the stuff of farce. And it is the story’s farcical elements – rendered even more absurd by the huge ramifications of those events on the history of the 20th century – that actor and playwright Kate Mulvany mines in her new play The Rasputin Affair, which had its world premiere at the Ensemble Theatre last night.

^{John Gaden, Tom Budge, Zindzi Okenyo and Hamish Michael in Kate Mulvany’s The Rasputin Affair. Photos © Prudence Upton}

Set in a portrait-lined room of the Moika Palace on December 29, 1916, with a hoard of Bolshevik protestors rapidly approaching, a trio of nervous noblemen plot the death of the mystic, whose influence on the Tsar and Tsarina – not to...