When an obscure play called “The Kholops” opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2024, many Russians raced to see it, fearful that the authorities would quickly shut down the production. The play’s exploration of a censored and repressive society resonated deeply with those living in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, and the production seemed ripe for a crackdown.

But nearly two years later, the doors remain wide open and the seats packed for “The Kholops,” written in 1907 by the Russian playwright Pyotr Gnedich.

Critics have fallen in love with the play. One magazine said the production’s director, a leading light in contemporary Russian theater named Andrei Moguchiy, had transformed “a half-forgotten chamber play into a sweeping and tragic symphony.” Another said “The Kholops” was a “rare instance where the public and the professional community converged, declaring it the best in Russia.”

The production all but swept the Golden Soffit awards, St. Petersburg’s prestigious theater awards.

Amid the fanfare, people from across the country have flocked to the show, at the 800-seat Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater. On a recent evening, limousines lined the curb out front. Chauffeurs ushered out government officials, business leaders and other members of the country’s upper crust, all arriving to spend more than four hours taking in a production that attacks, slyly but patently, the system of which they are beneficiaries.

“The Kholops” (the title means “The Serfs”) is performed only a few times every other month, a standard timetable in Russia. Tickets can sell for as much as $450, and shows have promptly sold out. More than 3,000 people have joined a waiting list to see it, should new dates be added.

All the while, the typically zealous Russian authorities, who have forced the closure of many productions critical of modern Russia, have kept their hands off the play. The reasons are most likely manifold.

“The Kholops” became a hit so immediately that officials seemed to recognize that closing it would incite a scandal, and they appear to have taken comfort in the fact that tickets are not only expensive but also scarce, so far limiting how many everyday citizens can actually see it. The country’s elites are evidently proud that the glossy production makes the play feel lifted from Broadway or the West End, evoking for outsiders Russia’s centrality to global culture. (Those elites, in any case, seem disinclined to rebel against Putin.)

At the same time, many critics and theatergoers in Russia have posited that “The Kholops” has avoided intense scrutiny because, as scathing as the play is toward Russian society under Putin, its judgments arrive largely indirectly.

“The Kholops” tells the story of a noble family living in the dark period of early-19th-century Russia, when the country was briefly ruled by the mercurial Czar Paul I, a paranoid tyrant who so bewildered his court that its members murdered him with the help of his own son.

The family’s mansion is filled with serfs — laborers who were, in fact, bought and sold — and when one of them returns from Paris, where he caught the liberal fever of the French Revolution, he condemns his fellow Russians as mindless lackeys who “sit like frogs in a swamp, wiggle their noses and croak.” (The serf, who had been given to a Parisian nobleman, says he had no choice but to flee the city because his “heart began to ache” for “damned” St. Petersburg.) From a loge above the stage, the czar sneers at the proceedings, munching on sausage and cawing like a crow.

Into Gnedich’s text Moguchiy wove an ancillary tale set in contemporary Russia. Some two centuries after the performance’s main action, workers from Uzbekistan are refurbishing the mansion — even as a couple of Chinese investors hope to demolish the tumbledown building and raise something new in its place.

The investors bribe one of the Uzbek workers to make sure that the building collapses, relieving them of the need, and the hassle, of getting the authorities’ permission to tear it down themselves.

Moguchiy worked as the Bolshoi Drama Theater’s artistic director until 2023, when the country’s Ministry of Culture apparently deemed him insufficiently loyal to the Kremlin and decided not to renew his contract.

But he is still permitted to produce plays at the theater, and “The Kholops” highlights themes deeply familiar here: widespread tyranny, oppression and corruption; a perpetual longing to abandon the country for a freer, less provincial place (while knowing that its emotional hold is inexorable); a self-defeating loyalty to authority; and China’s expanding influence on the country, as well as its disregard for Russian history and tradition.

“There are no hidden meanings here,” said Kristina Matviyenko, a Russian theater critic and scholar. “It is a production in which you directly feel this tortuous situation.”

One of the play’s central tenets is what many Russians see as a nearly eternal feature of their society: Everyone, from the poor and powerless to the wealthy and connected, is owned by someone.

When the czar banishes an influential prince for taking more than a few days to procure new army uniforms, the prince delivers a speech that certainly strikes a chord with Russia’s privileged class.

“Why do I, a rich and independent man, find myself in the position of the last serf?” he asks. “Why have I been a lackey all my life? Why did I live in this stupid city, and why did I wear wigs when I did not want to wear them at all?”

The success of “The Kholops” is all the more notable because contemporary theater has become an especially perilous business since Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022. In July 2024, the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and the director Zhenya Berkovich were each sentenced to six years in prison for “justifying terrorism” through Petriychuk’s play “Finist the Brave Falcon,” which interweaves a Russian fairy tale with the story of a woman falling in love with a radical extremist online.

The verdict stunned the Russian arts community. But Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities have remained peppered with small theaters selling out productions that might not appear politically subversive but whose form and flavor cut against the Kremlin’s politics of today.

One tiny theater in Moscow, Prostranstvo Vnutri (or “Internal Space”), has been described as “an ark for independent artists.” Like “The Kholops,” its recent production of “The Overcoat,” based on an 1842 short story by Nikolai Gogol, proved wildly popular with the Russian public, providing another opportunity to contemplate contemporary Russia in the intimacy of a darkened theater. “We are proud while our roof is leaking,” laments one character in the play.

As Marina Davydova, a Russian theater critic and producer currently living in exile in Berlin (after becoming a vocal critic of the Ukraine invasion), put it, theater in Russia “is a bit bigger than just theater.” It has a way of signaling, if not outright effectuating, watershed historical moments.

An opulent production of the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov’s “Masquerade,” a drama of crime and punishment, for instance, premiered in 1917 on the day the country’s last czar abdicated. Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Days of the Turbins,” which Stalin saw more than 15 times, made clear how Soviet czars had used art to amplify their power. The director Yuri Lyubimov’s exploration of supreme power in crisis in his 1980s production of “Boris Godunov” presaged the Soviet collapse.

“When there is no freedom, theater begins to play a fundamental role,” Davydova said. In Russia, she added, theater often becomes a form of therapy — “the main type of art where people come to console themselves.”

And to “The Kholops,” the people have come, intent on finding at least a little release from their society’s ills.

When the czar’s death is eventually announced, the play’s characters can only let out a collective good riddance. “Rest in peace!” the lady of the house shouts with derision.