Holy Fool – Park Theatre
Throughout history, music and art have been used as vehicles to communicate hidden truths by creatives living under tyrannical states. Here, the legendary composer Dmitri ‘Mitya’ Shostakovich is presented as Communist Russia's Holy Fool; a man who must walk the tightrope between underplaying his talents and concealing his resistance to the state in order to survive the propaganda-led brutality of Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
In Holy Fool, co-writers Rosalind Adler and Lea Sellers document Mitya's life from 1936 to 1973, but in trying to navigate the tightrope of life-threatening political resistance through faux compliance, the play occasionally loses its balance. While Adler and Sellers stay faithful to the historical record and portray the sinister world inside the Soviet regime, ...