Based on the kidnap of 900 people in Dubrovka theatre in Moscow (Russia) in 2002 by an armed group of Chechens demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from their country and which ended after two-and-a-half days of negotiations with 171 dead, La Fura dels Baus poses deep questions in relation to terrorism. Sometimes, terror is our response to terror; it is this paradox that is the very essence of the title that La fura has replaced with the original musical, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, in which an impostor seizes power intent on overthrowing a corrupt leader and everyone knows that he will be no better than the leader he wishes to replace.

With modern language peppered with contemporary references, Boris Godunov features the disputes between the terrorists and those between members of the crisis cabinet with intervention by a mediator who attempts to reconcile the position of the hostage-takers with that of the government of an imaginary nation, since the authors have resorted to archetypal terrorism in order to avoid controversy.

“The Dubrovka tragedy took place in a captured theatre, for me the most terrible of backdrops. The audience that had gone to enjoy the escapism of a musical (Nord-Ost) ended up immersed in a play that it had not chosen, with an undesirable ending. This Boris Godunov began to take shape when I considered the possibility of offering the audience an infinitesimal taste, softened by fiction, of what another audience had to experience in one of the most tragic of real-life episodes.”   Àlex Ollé