3rd year BA - Hons Theatre & Drama Studies (CIT Cork School of Music) present THE SUICIDE by Nikolai Erdman, directed by Johnny Hanrahan.

A SOVIET SATIRE FROM THE EDGE OF REASON

This is CIT Cork School of Music BA - Hons Theatre & Drama Studies production.

Stack Theatre, CIT Cork School of Music
11-14 April
7:00pm
Tickets: €15 or €10 conc.

Now on sale:

‘I’m happy, comrades, happy as a Tsar… I’m flying!..I wasn’t much in life but when I’m dead hear me roar! I’m a Colossus! A Caesar!’ Semyon is down on his luck, down in the dumps and up to his neck in debt and despair. By now it’s a matter of life and death. His death!! But in Stalin’s Russia, privacy is off the agenda and a decent comrade can’t even kill himself without every Boris, Vlad and Yuri trying to get in on the act. ‘Kill yourself for the workers!’ they cry. ‘For poetry! For the rights of women! For Love! For Jesus! For whatever you’re havin’ yourself !!’ Every hanger-on and social climber in Moscow tries to convince him to do himself in for one cause or the other.
In Stalin’s Russia nothing makes sense; it’s a madhouse run by a vicious lunatic, a nightmare from which nobody can wake up. Unless, like our suicidal clown, you decide you’ve had enough of waiting around for your life to begin and you take control of your own death. Erdman may not have invented gallows humour, but in this hilarious, terrifying comedy of Soviet manners he pushes the boundaries of satirical farce into the thrilling territories of the grotesque and in so doing puts a knife in the heart of Stalinist tyranny.
This is a big, bright, bold production of a neglected classic which squeezes hysterical laughter from the most horrific of subjects. Designed to provoke. It’s bound to