Bedbug - The Musical

A musical based on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1929 satire on the distrust of authority and the threat of the independent voice to the socialist system during a time of growing disillusion with the Soviet Union.

Ivan Varlet is making a class change. As he prepares to marry his bourgeois bride, the former mechanic casts off his socialist acquaintances and re-invents himself as ‘Ivor Violet’. Before he can embark on his new life, however, a fire at the wedding kills all the guests, and sees Ivan trapped in the ice cellar, frozen into a state of cryogenesis.

Fifty years later, after the creation of a global socialist state following a world war, Ivan is unfrozen into an unrecognisable Russia.