It’s hard to watch Nikolai Erdman’s wonderfully quirky satire of Soviet life without laughter, but also without pain. That’s partly because Anna Mackmin’s revival catches the funny-desperate tone of the tale of the unemployed man who sees suicide as the answer to the everyday agonies of Moscow in 1930, but even more because one knows how many fine plays the dramatist might have written had he not, like so many others, been silenced by Stalin and his hyena-pack Yet how could Stanislavsky, who asked Uncle Joe to overturn the ban already imposed by the censors, have dreamt that the play could be performed in a Russia succumbing to cultural darkness? Oddly, Moira Buffini’s lively adaptation omits the passage in which the would-be-suicide, Semyon, drunkenly phones the Kremlin, announcing that he wants to tell the top man that he’s an “individual” and doesn’t like Marx; but plenty remains that shows why Erdman was too provocative to be permitted.

That’s evident from the moment Tom Brooke’s Semyon, a Dickensian waif whose hair sprouts upright in dismay, wakes in the night to beg his wife for what the family doesn’t have, namely food, and then frantically describes himself as a parasite, maggot and “blood-sucking leech”. He’s obviously parroting official jargon but, as the play proceeds, equally obviously attacking a society strong on filling forms and short on giving jobs or, indeed, allowing people to admit their frustration and pain. As a distressed intellectual called Aristarkh says, “These days only the dead can say what the living think”.

Ronan Vibert’s precious Aristarkh is one of several representative figures who turn up after Semyon, having hilariously failed to make his fortune by learning the tuba, opts for suicide. Will he kindly leave a note saying he’s died on behalf of Russia’s intelligentsia? Other predatory malcontents also want him to self-destruct for their causes, notably Michelle Dockery’s Kleopatra Maximovna, who thinks romantic love is disappearing, and Tony Rohr as a battered priest.

Erdman satirised these people. Moreover, he never questioned the Russian Revolution itself. What clearly upset the censors was that he showed the growing disillusion of a proletarian household well evoked by Mackmin’s often rumbustious production and Lez Brotherston’s set: the spiralling staircase of a once-posh house now patrolled by a self-appointed vigilante who peeks into the collective loo so as to assess women “from the Marxist point of view”.

Buffini’s translation turns up the anti-Soviet criticism, but doesn’t distort the essential play either when it turns farcical, with Semyon faking dead, or politically pointed, as when he bounds from his coffin to declare that all he wants is a living wage and “the freedom to whisper” his discontent in a Russia that’s becoming “a factory of slogans”. In 1930 that was enough to send Erdman into exile and wreck his career.

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