Theatre reviews: Faithful Ruslan at the Citz | The Coolidge Effect at the Traverse | Disturbed at Oran Mor

It’s said that when Georgi Vladimov’s novella Faithful Ruslan was first circulated in samizdat in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, readers saw it as an allegorical story about the fate of the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin in 1956. Set in Siberia during the liberalisation that followed Stalin’s death, it tells the story of a faithful prison-camp guard dog so strictly trained that when the camp is closed, and his adored master – a camp corporal – spares his life but tells him to get lost, he simply refuses to accept the change, rejecting all offers of food, trying to stick to the old rules, and searching everywhere for his worthless master.