Perhaps it was just a matter of time before Vladislav Y. Surkov became a stage character. Surkov, an influential ideologist who spent two decades in the orbit of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, once trained as a theater director; in 2011, the novelist Eduard Limonov described Surkov as having refashioned Russia “into a wonderful postmodernist theater,” according to the London Review of Books.
“The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a new French production directed by Roland Auzet, makes a pointed case for Surkov’s pivotal role in Russian, and international, politics. Staged through Nov. 3 at La Scala Paris, a fairly new Right Bank playhouse, it is an adaptation of a French novel that sold over half a million copies after Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2022.
The book, a fictionalized account of Surkov’s life and career, was the work of a former political adviser to Italy’s government, Giuliano da Empoli. (An English translation was released by Other Press in 2023.) In France, the book was so popular that some worried it could shift national policy toward Russia.
Onstage, it’s easy to see why. Philippe Girard plays the lead role as an expressive, eccentric figure, often sympathetic. Vadim Baranov, as Surkov’s fictional alter ego is called, loves rap music, Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock, we learn, and speaks in dark quips. (“What’s a Soviet duo? A quartet who went abroad.”)
Yet throughout, Baranov also sheds light on the ruthless rise of Putin’s party and the roots of the president’s power. “The destiny of Russians is to be governed by descendants of Ivan the Terrible,” Baranov says near the beginning.
The stage version of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” mirrors Surkov’s perceived postmodernism in a somewhat superficial and literal sense. The cast wanders around boilerplate sets: a sleek, impersonal house of mirrors, with panels that reflect the audience members back to themselves. The furniture — nondescript armchairs and couches, mostly — makes the stage look like a ’90s corporate waiting room.
The framing of Baranov’s story also suffers in this adaptation. In the novel, he is introduced by a narrator, a French journalist who secures a rare interview after Baranov’s departure from the Kremlin. (In real life, Putin fired Surkov in 2020.) The reporter’s voice soon gives way to Baranov’s as he tells his life story, so that the journalist feels superfluous onstage: He has no real depth, and mostly appears to provoke Baranov into answers.
“The Wizard of the Kremlin” finds its feet instead when Baranov is in the company of politicians and power brokers, who are referred to by their real names. Auzet, the director, structured his adaptation into three parts. The lengthy middle one, set around 2000 and focused on Putin’s rise, is sandwiched between scenes that take place in the present, and refer to current events in Russia and Ukraine.
Opposite Girard as Baranov, Hervé Pierre, a former member of the Comédie-Française company, traces a tragic arc for Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who helped plot Putin’s move into politics in the late 1990s. Entertainingly bullish at first, he returns later as an exile, begging to be allowed to return to “the Motherland.” (It’s not Berezovsky’s first turn onstage: he was also recently a central character in Peter Morgan’s play “Patriots,” in the West End and on Broadway.)
Andranic Manet boasts a surprising likeness to Putin, and his take on the Russian president is coldblooded to the point of thuggish. Given the macho nature of Russia’s government, the female characters are less prominent, though Xenia, Baranov’s fictional wife (played by Irène Ranson Terestchenko) does perform a spirited Russian-language version of the Coolio song “Gangsta’s Paradise” with another cast member, Claire Sermonne, injecting unexpected whimsy into the proceedings.
Some scenes of political sparring — between Baranov and Berezovsky, or when Putin smears a bust of Stalin with blood, jealous of the Soviet leader’s enduring popularity — are captivating. They dive into Russia’s history, sense of national pride and wary relationship with democracy, delineating the logic behind Baranov’s vision for a “sovereign democracy.”
Yet given the complexity of Russian politics, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” could use a little breathing room here and there, especially when it comes to connecting the novel — written before Russia invaded Ukraine — with the events that have taken place since. The appearance of the failed putschist Yevgeny V. Prigozhin (played by Jean Alibert) in a taped scene near the end — in which Prigozhin says he didn’t actually die in a plane crash last year — is an odd postscript to da Empoli’s story, for instance.
Baranov wavers, near the end of “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” in ways that are intriguing to try and reconcile with his early political mercilessness. Does one of the most powerful men in recent Russian history really have regrets? The show — like the novel — does humanize its version of Surkov, but in the end, it only makes the political machine he built more chilling.
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