Midnight: A Musical

As the clock ticks towards midnight on New Year's Eve, a husband and wife talk nervously about what the future holds for them and their fellow citizens.

Welcome to Azerbaijan, part of the police state of the Soviet Union in the dying minutes of 1937. The past year has been the worst of the Great Terror, in which the paranoid dictator Joseph Stalin unleashed wave upon wave of arrests. Millions have been tortured and executed. Informants and spies are everywhere. No one knows who to trust.

And then comes the dreaded knock on the door. Is it the NKVD, the state's ruthless secret police? Or a far more mysterious - and terrifying - visitor? Dark secrets emerge, time is suspended and the husband and wife are tested to breaking point - and beyond...

Timothy Knapman's adaptation of the play Citizens of Hell by Elichin Afandiyev, one of Azerbaijan's foremost playwrights, with music and lyrics by Laurence Mark Wythe, is a haunting, powerful and stunningly topical examination of life under tyrannical political rule. The original London production played at the Union Theatre in 2018, directed by Kate Golledge.