THE CABAL OF HYPOCRITES. Director Irina Keruchenko

The Cabal of Hypocrites is probably the most “personal”, confessionary play by Mikhail Bulgakov. The story of the great French playwright — about art, power and inevitable fate – evolves in the settings of the brilliant epoch of the Sun King. However, the events and characters will seem familiar to us as relations between artists and authorities have always been very complicated.

The action takes place in the time of the Musketeers, that is why the play is full of secrets, intrigues, love, sword play, music and dances, the tragic and the funny.

The fate of Bulgakov’s play was not easy, probably, the hardest one in comparison with his other plays. Seven years passed between the completion of the play and its premiere on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1936. Before then, the play was one day forbidden, another day allowed to be put on stage, rehearsals took five years, the cast changed more than once. Theatre-goers managed to see the production only eight times: after an article in the Pravda newspaper entitled “External Glamour and False Content”, the play was dropped from the repertory. The distant epoch showed in the play did not take off the guard of “art critics wearing civilian clothes” – the story of relationships between Moliere, King Louis and mysterious “Cabal of Sacred Writing” clearly rhymed with the surrounding reality. Today The Cabal of Hypocrites takes pride of place on stages of Russian theatres. The Penza Drama Theatre production was staged by the well-known Moscow director Irina Keruchenko specially for the 50th birthday of the Artistic Director of The Penza Drama Theatre, Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation Sergey Kazakov, starring as Jean-Baptiste Moliere.