Dying For It

Moira Buffini is one of the UK's leading dramatists. She has written acclaimed films and plays, including The Dig (BAFTA-nominated), Jane Eyre, Byzantium, Tamara Drewe, Dinner and Handbagged (Olivier Award winner). For young adults she has written Silence, A Vampire Story and the musical, wonder.land. She was co-creator and showrunner of the TV series Harlots. Songlight was her debut novel. Nikolai Erdman was born in 1902, and began working in the theatre during the period of relative creative freedom which followed the Russian Revolution. He helped to found the Moscow Theatre of Satire in 1924, and Meyerhold directed his first play, The Mandate, at his own recently formed theatre in 1925; but The Suicide was banned before its dress rehearsal in 1929, and Erdman was exiled to Siberia from 1933 to 1940. He wrote little original work following his rehabilitation, although he joined Yuri Lyubimov at the newly founded Taganka Theatre in 1964. He died in 1970. The Suicide was first performed in Britain by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979, three years before it received a belated Russian premiere.