A Cloud in Trousers: A tragicomedy of Russian Futurism

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

(Horace Walpole)

Russia. Winter. 1915. A dynasty totters and the fields of Europe are fed with the blood of a generation. Aristocratic certainties reel before the angry and implacable masses.

Into the literary salons of Petrograd staggers a bedraggled figure in an army greatcoat: Signalman Velemir Khlebnikov, deserter, mathematician, poet, linguist, Grand Wizard of Russian Futurism and self-proclaimed President of the Globe.

Not for Khlebnikov the aggressive polemical certainties of fellow poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's bear-like embrace of the Bolshevik revolution, nor his friend's desperate romantic entanglement in the marriage of a ballerina and a lawyer. Instead, his formidably mysterious mind is grappling with the healing of a pain-wracked cosmos.

He has formulated a numerological theory whose application could end forever the long blood-glut of history. And he has devised a universal language whose use could render the failures of communication he perceives both in his friends and the world at large as obsolete as his army-issue signal flags.

Time bends as often as your mind in this anarchic, cosmological comedy. The King of the Future makes history, and synchronicity roles o.k.

"All will be forgotten by mankind
After it arrives in the land of Futurism;
But, I, for my courage
Will be honoured with a bizarre monument..."
(Khlebnikov, May 1914)

"...unusual, grim, absurd...often funny...A CLOUD IN TROUSERS exposes a deeply confused country seeking a viable political agenda..."

(James Christopher, TIME OUT.)