PETROV! A Cold War Cabaret
Creative Development – August 2025
Crimson Rosella spent a week in August in our nation’s capital working on another creative development – this time in collaboration with our friends at the Canberra Theatre Centre. The idea for PETROV! A Cold War Cabaret is one that’s been burning a hole in the bottom drawer for a while, so when CTC told us they were looking for Canberra-based projects, we couldn’t wait to suggest The Petrov Affair!
Finally, Australia’s own 1950s soviet spy defection scandal is given the retrospective it deserves: a Cold War Cabaret featuring the signature sounds of the Rat Pack of the Balkans, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, with a crackling script by the brilliant Sheridan Harbridge (Sydney Theatre Company’s 2025 Patrick White Fellow, MTC’s My Brilliant Career) and Lindy Hume’s direction. The digital design environment for PETROV! incorporates original media from the National Film and Sound Archive, National Library and the Museum of Australian Democracy.
PETROV! is told from the perspective of Petrov’s wife Evdokia (brought vividly to life in the creative development by actor Blazey Best). Herself a high-ranking KGB agent, Evdokia’s survival story is a wild ride from Stalin’s global spy network to suburban Melbourne. Blindsided by her husband’s defection, she made headlines around the globe by dramatically leaving a single red shoe on the tarmac at Sydney Airport when Soviet gunmen bustled her, weeping, onto the plane back to Moscow.
Our work-in-progress showing turned the CTC rehearsal studio into a temporary nightclub where small audience shared around 45 minutes of PETROV!, the results of our five intense days, an eccentric storytelling mash-up of true crime, fiction, Soviet Era geopolitics, Cold War paranoia and nostalgia for the relative innocence of 1950s Canberra. We’re now planning a further development of PETROV! where tabloid journalism and cabaret deliciousness come together to tell the wild spy story that captured the world’s imagination.
Watch this space. It will be watching you!
