Armando Simon

Darkness at Noon Armando Simon

Right after the Second World War, a literary thunderbolt shook the European intelligentsia. A former Communist from Hungary published Darkness at Noon. In it, he portrayed an Old Guard Bolshevik who has been arrested by Stalin's NKVD. He is expected to cooperate at his upcoming show trial and confess to all sorts of absurd crimes. Although being an intellectual he can rationalize cooperating and obeying The Party, deep inside he feels revulsion for the grotesque demands, and, for his own personal participation in The Party. This work revealed the inner psychology of such individuals and mirrored the grotesque show trials of the 1930s orchestrated by Josef Stalin. This is a theatrical adaptation of the novel by Arthur Koestler.