A bare-chested Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin strokes the bottom of an Olympic gymnast and overdoses on Botox as his wife, Lyudmila, takes refuge in a monastery — in a new staging of a play at a Moscow theater.
The play — staged ahead of today’s polls where Putin is expected to win back the presidency — takes plenty of inspiration from Internet gossip and breaks almost every remaining taboo about the leader’s personal life.
The play, Berlusputin, is a Russian adaptation of a work by Italian playwright Dario Fo called L’anomalo Bicefalo. However, every performance is updated to include the latest news.
Photo: AFP
The play imagines what might happen if half of former Italian prime minister and Putin buddy Silvio Berlusconi’s brain was transplanted into the Russian leader’s head after an accident. However, true to Fo’s street theater philosophy, the performance in Moscow at the ground-breaking Teatr.doc house in the center of the city is very much a work in progress.
People lined up in the snow to catch two consecutive performances on Friday in the black-painted cellar theater known for its hard-hitting political plays. The tiny, sweaty theater was sold out.
“This play is probably a producer’s dream. There’s only two roles and crazy interest in the play,” director Varvara Faer said.
The play’s absurd plot imagines that Berlusconi has died of a attack and Putin, injured, has been given a transplant of half his brain.
Unexpectedly, he reveals previously unseen liberal tendencies and even “repents” in front of the parliament. However, then a Botox overdose has a reverse effect.
A flurry of speculation on the Internet backed up by picture evidence has suggested that Putin, 59, underwent cosmetic procedures to reverse the ageing process. However, this had always been denied by aides.
Putin is played by an actor with foam muscles strapped to his chest, while an actress devoutly wraps herself in a headscarf to play his wife, who has got a little too close to her spiritual adviser at a monastery.
“You kept me for 20 years on a short leash,” Lyudmila says. “You tormented me, you always tormented me.”
His marriage is another subject of frenzied Internet speculation and Putin has not been seen in public with his wife for months. His spokesman has said this is simply because Putin is very busy.
The theater’s frank airing of the rumors about Putin’s private life is a bold move in Russia, where state media and even opposition-inclined newspapers and television observe a rigid silence on the issue.
The Botox overdose results in Putin morphing into Dobby the house elf from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, in a joke unlikely to amuse the leader.
A television puppet show that parodied Putin as a grotesque dwarf closed shortly after he became president in 2000. And he was reportedly offended by widespread comments on his resemblance to Dobby when the the film depiction came out back in 2003.
The audience broke into applause after a spoof of state television news coverage of Putin speaking to the parliament and Vladimir Churov, the much-disliked head of the Central Electoral Commission. The lobotomized Putin expresses his horror at the “Party of Crooks and Thieves,” an opposition term for the ruling United Russia party.
And gasps and laughter came as the actor playing Putin leered at a projection on the wall of Olympic rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabayeva twirling her ribbons and then stroked his hand across her bottom. A newspaper in 2008 alleged that Putin was about to divorce and marry Kabayeva, rumors that both angrily denied, but which have lingered on.
The play also satirizes claims by pro-Kremlin politicians that protests and Putin’s power swap with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are financed by the US Department of State, with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton making an appearance. In a performance days before the presidential election, Berlusconi took a back seat to topical jokes.
“We will do this play as long as Putin is in power,” the director said.
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