BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
15/02/2008
Actors who take real risks on stage
By Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard
Defiant: the Belarus Free Theatre is appearing in London at considerable risk to the company
Well, this certainly puts English theatre's recent bother with the Arts Council to shame. The Belarus Free Theatre, appearing in London at no inconsiderable risk to the company, is banned in its repressively policed homeland, where audiences are notified of secret performances via text message. It sounds like the kind of thing that the master of menace himself, Harold Pinter, might have dreamt up.
In a compendium evening that blends translated extracts from Pinter with the testimony of Belarusian political prisoners, there are a number of highly disconcerting moments when it is unclear where the fiction ends and the fact begins. It soon becomes apparent that Pinter's works, with their ever-present sense of disquiet and threat, are an ideal match for Vladimir Scherban's sparky, persecuted company.
Nonetheless, it's unclear why we need to linger quite so long on the personal before getting busy with the political. The scenes from The Homecoming and Old Times are brought to vivid life by a skilled ensemble of seven actors but the real zing comes with the tyrannical dictats and state-sponsored brutality of Mountain Language and One for the Road.
A clever framing device has one actor being Harold Pinter and delivering sections of his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the importance of questioning received truth. The word "pravda" rings out repeatedly, ominously.
There are the usual tedious problems with the mechanics of the subtitles, which are awkwardly run on a screen above the performers' heads. This means we have to make a constant choice between words - and this company doesn't half talk fast - and expressions, when both would be preferable.
Far more successful are the two large black-and-white panels under this screen that display a close-up of Pinter's face with its searching, unreadable eyes.
Further displays of such solidarity with the Belarus Free Theatre are greatly to be welcomed but I would recommend next time they really go to town on a single text. For a framing lecture, they could do worse than the topic of Being Us.
Source:
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