... Boris Godunov, Pushkin's epic play about the fierce internal struggles for the Russian crown after the death of Ivan the Terrible, is overtly political to begin with. But in the stark modern-dress production devised by British theater director Declan Donnellan for the Chekhov Intl. Theater Festival, the 19th-century drama feels like tomorrow's bad news.

Between the ferocious performance energy and the striking modern imagery – which includes a textually superfluous but amusing seduction scene staged in a garden fountain – the play artfully slides out of its historical setting and into a modern-day Russia where the laws of political chicanery still apply in the eternal fight for power. As Godunov the peasant-imposter presses his claim over Dmitry the monk-pretender, it's deliciously clear we could be watching the bellicose antics of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, or Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, or Vladimir Putin and any or all of the above. ...