National Theatre Live: Collaborators

For the first time ever, TIC is partnering with the National Theatre in London in a groundbreaking initiative to bring the "best of British theatre" to Evanston. Last year, National Theatre Live played to more than 200 venues around the world. Now NT Live will broadcast its highly-praised productions to TIC, offering Chicago and North Shore audiences some of the world’s greatest theatre performances! Join us for our third broadcast of the season, Collaborators!

Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom. Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he’s offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday.

Inspired by historical fact and directed by National Theatre Artistic Director Nicholas Hytner, this blistering new play by John Hodge (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave) depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny. Featuring Alex Jennings (The Habit of Art) as Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale (London Assurance) as Stalin.