BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
26/01/2009
Pinter resonates throughout Belarus
Cameron Woodhead
BELARUS has been described as Europe's last dictatorship. President Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; his rule has been marked by human rights violations and manipulation of the electoral and constitutional processes.
In 2005, Belarus Free Theatre was formed in response to state censorship.
Understandably, the company has an affinity for the work of Harold Pinter, whose dramatic imagination spiralled suggestively around the kind of authoritarian nightmare that shadows Belarus, and whose Nobel acceptance speech set out so eloquently the twin imperatives of artistic and political freedom.
Being Harold Pinter assembles extracts of a range of Pinter's plays, mixing them with excerpts from his Nobel speech.
Vladimir Shcherban's adaptation focuses as much on Pinter's comedy as his famed sense of menace. But it is the latter that builds with increasing force: from the insinuations of atrocity in Ashes to Ashes, through the torture scene from The Birthday Party, to the more instantly familiar forms of tyranny in Mountain Language.
A sophisticated embodiment of the ideals Pinter cherished, the production would be of most benefit in the one place it cannot be performed without fear.
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