For much of the past two decades, political storytelling shifted to documentary streaming platforms, podcasts, opinion journalism, and social media formats. Theater, which historically served as a space for public argument and civic reflection, often drifted toward personal narratives, identity-centered themes, or non-political experimentation. Recently, however, multiple productions across different countries have begun to revive political biography, institutional critique, and power analysis through live performance. Three works in particular — La Vie et la Mort de J. Chirac, Murdoch: The Final Interview, and Boris — demonstrate how contemporary theater is rebuilding its capacity to interrogate political influence, responsibility, and legacy without relying on either propaganda or sensationalism.
La Vie et la Mort de J. Chirac : A Political Séance in Real Time
Staged at Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, Léo Cohen-Paperman’s La Vie et la Mort de J. Chirac is not merely a biographical reconstruction; it is a live, intellectual séance where two actors, Julien Campani et Clovis Fouin or Mathieu Metral, embody Chirac’s ghost with both seriousness and absurdity. Rather than reproducing history, they fracture it, remix it, and narrate it like a fever dream with the audience as unwilling co-conspirators.
The brilliance of the production lies not in satire but in method. These two veterans operate almost like cognitive engineers, mining memory, rumor, and political legend. At several points they suspend the scripted narrative to interrogate spectators. They do not select volunteers in, “who wants to play?” manner; instead, they turn the quiet observer into historiographical evidence. At one performance, the actors asked multiple audience members about their personal historical timelines and seamlessly absorbed their answers into the narrative. One woman said she was six years old when Chirac returned from America after abandoning his first love. This detail — casual, personal, and unverifiable — was treated as part of the narrative framework, showing how political memory is assembled from a mixture of public record and lived experience. The production suggests that understanding a leader requires hearing not only formal history, but the minor, subjective memories that citizens carry with them.
Murdoch: The Final Interview — Journalism, Responsibility, and the Uncontrolled Consequence
Murdoch: The Final Interview, staged Off-Broadway, presents a fictional final conversation with Rupert Murdoch, delivered as an extended interrogation that moves gradually from journalistic questioning to moral inquiry. What distinguishes the production is its refusal to turn Murdoch into either a caricature or a villain. Instead, it builds a profile using indirect evidence: his strict upbringing, a demanding family environment, and an early competitive mindset are presented as foundations for a career that eventually shaped major media ecosystems.
A central scene places Murdoch directly in the role of Dr. Frankenstein. This is not metaphor mentioned in passing — it is dramatized literally. The set shifts to a cold, isolated environment where Murdoch, as Frankenstein, searches for the creature he has created but no longer controls. No political figure is named, yet the reference is unmistakable. By withholding the name, the play avoids reducing itself to topical commentary and instead frames the issue as a structural one: what happens when a communications empire produces political outcomes that exceed the intentions of its architect?
Rather than accusing Murdoch of knowingly damaging journalism or democratic institutions, the play asks whether influence at scale can become a form of unintended political engineering. It frames responsibility not as malicious intent, but as a mismatch between capability, foresight, and accountability. The audience must decide whether Murdoch is a builder of platforms, a designer of influence, or an innovator who failed to anticipate downstream effects.
Boris — Myth, Tragedy, and the Shadows of National Identity
Dmitry Krymov’s Boris, based on Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, functions as the historical and poetic counterpart to the other two works. Where Chirac and Murdoch move through contemporary timelines, Krymov immerses the audience in the dramaturgy of Russian history, treating it as an unfinished, haunted narrative. Very little of Pushkin’s original text is retained. Instead, Krymov freely plays with other literary sources, weaving in lines from Eugene Onegin when one of the boyars pays homage to the newly crowned Boris, using Tatiana’s letter to Onegin as part of the ceremonial dialogue. This intertextuality amplifies the symbolic and ritualistic nature of the play, reminding the audience that history is always mediated through narrative, fiction, and interpretation.
The setting — stark warehouses of the Moscow Museum — situates the audience among saints, rulers, peasants, ghosts, and poets who coexist not as conventional characters but as recurring archetypes. Scenes often verge on absurdity: rather than visiting the graves of past rulers, Kremlin staff bring coffins directly to Boris, a gesture both practical and grotesque that mirrors contemporary perceptions of centralized power. Though Putin is never mentioned, it is unmistakable whom the play references. The absurd, ritualized staging, combined with intertextual appropriation, emphasizes the strange entanglement of bureaucracy, spectacle, and authority in Russian political culture.
If Chirac invites the audience into creation, and Murdoch demands psychological confrontation, Boris presents a historical echo chamber: the past never leaves, and the present cannot fully escape it.
Why These Productions Matter
At the beginning of Murdoch: The Final Interview, the projection reads, “Journalists may write the first draft of history, but dramatists write the last.” This positions theater not as a recorder of events, but as an interpreter of their meaning. Unlike news or social media, which compress complexity into headlines or soundbites, political theater slows perception, highlights consequences, and allows audiences to see how leaders’ actions ripple through society, culture, and memory.
Chirac, Murdoch, and Boris suggest a profound insight: the true “political monsters” are not the leaders themselves, but the public — including the audience — whose attention, biases, and consent give rise to them. Power is co-created, and theater exposes this dynamic, forcing the audience to confront their own complicity and capacity for monstrosity.
In this way, political theater continues the cathartic function of drama dating back to ancient Greece: not to release fear, but to hold a mirror to society and to the audience itself. These plays are both reflective and hugely entertaining, proving that intellectual rigor and dramatic delight need not be mutually exclusive.