19:00, Tue 21st – Sat 25th November 2017 at Corpus Playroom
Michaelmas Week 7

'Killing my enemies is easy. The challenge is to control their minds. And I think I controlled yours pretty well. In years to come, I'll be able to say: 'Bulgakov? Yeah, we even trained him. He gave up. He saw the light. We broke him, we can break anybody'. It's man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins.'

Moscow, 1938.
A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom. Dissident playwright Mikhail Bulgakov has both, despite being stalked by the secret police. Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer after he’s offered a poisoned chalice in exchange for freedom: write a play glorifying Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Help is at hand, however, when the dictator himself decides to help out in the writing of the play – and Bulgakov takes over the running of the Soviet Union!

‘Collaborators’ is both hilarious and surreal, charting an artist’s slow erosion of principle and certainty involved in collaboration as he is confronted with the steamroller of absolute power.