If you think actor Joseph Cullen is cartoonish at the start of this chewy true-life story, you should see the grotesque caricature he becomes. Playing Bulgaria’s wartime king, he is so self-effacing he looks about to crumple down the middle. He is placatory and feeble, the Beano’s Walter the Softy made flesh.
The joke in Hannah Hauer-King’s production, written by Cullen and Sasha Wilson, is that nobody in this neglected Balkan country can take themselves seriously. The five-strong ensemble josh their way through silly accents and meta-gags as they send up a nation that knows it will never be a player on the world stage and is too laidback to care. The king is in good company.
Snappily written, wittily performed and brightly coloured by a live score that encompasses not just Slavic folk but also campfire gospel and protest song, it has a brisk knockabout charm.
But it also has a more serious purpose. Cullen plays Boris III, who ruled Bulgaria from 1918 to his suspicious death in 1943, as a reluctant monarch, averse to responsibility. But as Hitler’s Germany extends its territory, it becomes ever less possible for him to stay on the fence. A pact with the Nazis puts the fate of 50,000 Jews in his hands. “Service requires action,” he is reminded, as the comic evasions of the beginning become cruel moral choices.
Playing a game of double bluff – or is he? – the king morphs into a nasty parody of antisemitism, eating himself up with the inhumanity of it all. And as the movement of Out of the Forest theatre’s production goes from frivolous to ferocious, so the play makes us confront those awkward questions about appeasement and compromise, and the slippery line between honourable neutrality and collaboration. For all its fun and games, it is a play with a sting.
