In Praise of… Collaborators

I go to the theatre a lot at the NT.  And so many of my pictures from work seem to involve the South Bank, or the view from a certain fly tower… connection, who knows?

However, as with both the jobs I do, and the theatre I see, a lot of the time I hope you also notice that the productions I praise are mostly defined by their rarity.  There’s no denying that there’s a lot of rubbish written, and a lot of rubbish made, and I’ve been party to lighting a lot of it.  However, Collaborators at the National Theatre, is very much not rubbish.  It is, in fact, really bloody good.  I usually disapprove of writers who write about writers, as I think it’s lazy and not very imaginative, however, this play – about the relationship between Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the Master and Margerita among many others – isn’t just about a monster and a writer, or even really about the oppression of the Soviet state on art.  It’s about the destruction of people, their souls and what everything they believe in and stand for, by a thousand tiny cuts, and it is a brilliant study of the same.