Collaborators

de John Hodge

Taking its inspiration from historical fact, Collaborators explores the intense, paradoxical, and ultimately deadly connection between the dissident writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Josef Stalin, centering around a play that Bulgakov was forced to write to commemorate Stalin's sixtieth birthday. As Bulgakov loses himself in a world of secrets, threats, and paradoxes, and begins to fall ill from the kidney disease that would eventually kill him, his feverish dreams of conversations with Stalin become reality in his mind, just as the state's lies become truths in his play. Collaborators is a darkly comic portrait of the impossible choices facing any artist in a dictatorship, and a surreal journey into the imagination of a writer who loses himself in a macabre relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama.