McMafia: The Theatre Show @ Edinburgh Fringe

Based on his best-selling book, McMafia, and the BBC TV drama it inspired, Misha takes his audience on a tour through the dark depths of world capitalism in a mix of performance and presentation. He explains what’s happening behind the headlines – how Russian gangsters, Latin American cartel leaders, people traffickers and dodgy hedge-funders exert their influence on our lives without us realising it.

You will laugh at the animated sketches that explain the origins of Gangster Capitalism in Russia or the criminal heroes of the Internet, Carderplanet. You will be shocked by the death toll of the drugs industry but also learn why the drugs economy is being turned upside down. Meet the bosses and the foot soldiers and brace yourself for the terrifying world of the Internet of Things.

He starts the show with the revelation that his adult life began in organised crime, smuggling books and dismembered Xerox machines into dissident groups behind the Iron Curtain.

Misha was the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent responsible for the overall radio coverage of the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the wars in Yugoslavia. He got to know a number of key gangsters after the revolutions from Warsaw to Belgrade, from Moscow to Tirana. He then struck out to countries across the world, like a latter day Tintin, interviewing the bad guys about their business but also about their childhoods, attitudes to politics, religion and society.

Before becoming immersed in this world, Misha studied Drama at Bristol University where he appeared on stage in plays from playwrights as varied as Shakespeare and David Hare, not to mention his memorable partnership with Greg Doran, Director of the RSC, as the two Ugly Sisters in Cinderella.

McMafia is not just entertaining and theatrical, it addresses some of the most immediate and serious issues facing the world today. Book this show if you dare know the truth…