"Down with anti-hay-stacking sentiments!" exclaims Integom, a character in Andrey Platonov's newly translated play, 14 Little Red Huts. At a night hosted by the London Review of Books bookshop Russian émigrés and lovers of all things Russian gathered to listen to Robert Chandler, a translator of Russian literature, talk about the play. Both Platonov and his works are little known in the English-speaking world and Chandler has dedicated considerable time to translating this prickly writer.

Platonov was born in Russia in 1899 and had to grow up fast when the Revolution came. He trained as a land engineer but his true calling lay in literature. He wrote about what he knew and saw and his 1932 play, Fourteen Little Red Huts (Chetirnadtat krasnykh izbushek), touches on the trauma, hunger, and death which accompanied the rapid collectivisation in Russia. It also ridicules Western intellectuals through the character of Bos, perhaps tipping his hat to George Bernard Shaw, who visited the Soviet Union in 1931 and confidently reported that there was no famine or hunger. Robert Chandler called this play 'one of Platonov's fiercest, most satirical works'.

Supported by Academia Rossica, a charity set up in 2000 by a group of British academics and specialists in Russian culture, Sputnik Theatre performed the acts as translated and advised by Robert Chandler. Platonov produced a vast number of works throughout his life, but almost all of them were deemed politically incorrect and not in tune with the socialist realist writing expected at the time. His work is full or irony and sarcasm which the censors saw as undermining of Stalinism and Soviet policies.

Translating this play was a challenge that Robert Chandler revelled in. He found that the shorter Russian sentences, full of emotions obvious to a Russian speaker, are almost impossible to translate accurately into English. But despite the lack of room for manoeuvre he is certain that the themes in Platonov's work are universal and accessible to all.

Noah Birkstead-Breen who is at the helm of the Sputnik Theatre company was asked to direct the first two acts of this play. He agrees with Chandler: "There are definitely things which are hard for a British audience. Both at the general level - the suspicion of living in Soviet Russia - and the particular - what a 'kulak' is, for example. However, as long as the general gist of the play is made clear on stage, I believe a British audience can understand what is going on, even if certain things might be a bit opaque to them".

This was the first time the play was performed in English and the linguistic differences were a challenge to Birkstead-Breen: "As a director, you try to help people to understand things at an instinctive level, especially when there is a potential for ambiguity. For example, when the concept of kulak is introduced, you make sure the actor hisses it, so it is clear that the kulak is bad, is the enemy. The fact that it is a different world from the one we know - that's what makes it worthwhile. Platonov is more specific than a lot of other playwrights, so the challenge is greater, but the thrust of it is a story about the little man suffering from the big lies - something which communicates to any audience."

Black humour was frowned upon in the Soviet Union and anti-regime political satire was rewarded by time in the Gulag, but it could not be suppressed completely. This was one of the main outlets for frustration for Russian writers and is just as illuminating today. The performance of Platonov's plays reveals the mood and nuances of the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule.

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