‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Review: Putting Putin’s Rise Onstage

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.