Investigators asked to look into Moscow Art Theater production of An Ideal Husband

Kremlin and St. Basil's file photo

MOSCOW. Dec 28 (Interfax) – Requests to conduct an inquiry into the production of the play An Ideal Husband at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater (MAT) have been forwarded to the Russian Investigative Committee’s Moscow branch, the city police department said on its Twitter page.

“Twenty-three requests demanding an inquiry into the Chekhov MAT’s production of An Ideal Husband, which were received by police in November and December, have been sent to the Moscow branch of the Russian Investigative Committee,” it said.

It was announced on December 19 that the Moscow police would investigate whether Konstantin Bogomolov’s controversial production of the play An Ideal Husband complied with the law.

The Russian Orthodox Church described this production as blasphemous.

“In my opinion, the symbol of the crucifix was desecrated when a nearly naked woman tried to portray something resembling it,” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, told Interfax.

The theater’s production directly insults this sacred symbol, he said.

Apart from that, this production includes a “blasphemous attempt” to combine a simulation of matrimony with “a depiction of same-sex relations or something of the kind,” he said.

The God’s Will Orthodox public organization has started to collect signatures demanding the resignation of officials responsible for the production of the plays An Ideal Husband and The Brothers Karamazov at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater.

The authors of the address accused these productions of promoting “vice, homosexuality, pedophilia and drug addiction.”

At the end of October, Orthodox activist Dmitry Enteo attempt to disrupt An Ideal Husband performance at the theater.

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