Collaborators

Last night I had an interesting experience. Though I doubtless should not have been spending money I do not have, I went to a play at the University. Only it wasn't a play... it was live theater (happening in London at one of the National playhouses) on satellite feed. What an interesting experience.
If I was apprehensive because theater on film can be so flat and boring, talky, that was not at all the case here! It was terrific!
The play was about the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog, among other things. He was famous also as a playwright (White Guard).
Although he was famous as a satirist and dissident, he wrote at some point an uncharacteristic play about the early life of Stalin. This playwright, whose name I do not recall, was imagining what transpired to make him write such a piece, and created a work very much in the realm of the fantastic, reflecting Bulgakov's own work and the period of Futurism and the Silver Age in Russia.
He imagined an exchange occurring beneath the Kremlin in a secret tunnel in which Stalin, imagined as a clownish monster, exchanged roles with Bulgakov.
If you ever get a chance to see or read the play, take it. It was terrific.
There is a whole series like this, and it is very reasonable, but I know I cannot afford to go again until I pick up some work. I don't know if that will happen anytime soon.