The true story of the brief life and mysterious death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria. Maybe…
The Brief Life and Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria
at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford
on Tuesday, November 5 and Wednesday, November 6
Review by JON LEWIS
SASHA Wilson and Joseph Cullen’s comic play The Brief Life and Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria, places a historical character who’s relatively unknown to the British public centre stage.
Boris III, an absolute monarch who, although allied to the Nazis, refused to join the invasion of the Soviet Union.
He possibly saved the lives of thousands of Bulgarian Jews by employing them building roads rather than sending them as requested by the Gestapo to concentration camps.
Winston Churchill thought otherwise, as is seen later in the play after Boris’ death, castigating Boris for his public antisemitic broadcasts.
The authors suggest Boris’ Nazism was a cover. Cullen portrays Boris as a dashing man of the people, a brave patriot despite having no Bulgarian blood in his veins, hiding underneath a guise of a privileged, moustachioed paper tiger soldier.
He enters the stage from the stalls, interrupting a performance of the current, rather than historical, Bulgarian national anthem performed by the rest of the superb cast of actor-musicians.
Hannah Hauer-King’s entertaining production for Out of the Forest is infused with other songs, from Gregorian chants to Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land which is given a smart twist so that it becomes a homage to, and a critique of, Bulgarian nationalism.
When Boris’ Nazi government ministers, memorably performed as semi-incompetent self-important penpushers by David Leopold and Laurence Boothman, try to implement the Final Solution, the cast sing a couple of Jewish numbers that reflect the Bulgarian population’s support for their Jewish citizens during the war.
It is this support, voiced by the Jewish resistance leader Anka (Clare Fraenkel) and reflected by the bold anti-German actions of Stefan, the Patriarch (Leopold, doubling) and Liliana (Sasha Wilson), a senior civil servant spying on her ministers, that push Boris towards heroism.
The play’s title is a big hint that Boris’ death is as controversial and open to interpretation.
It’s likely that he was poisoned after meeting Hitler (performed comically as a coat rack) in Germany, when he stood up to the German leader. A fun, anarchic, unusual slice of modern history.
