BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

17/02/2008

Being Harold Pinter, Soho Theatre, London

By Sarah Hemming

It must be a strange sensation for the actors in the Belarus Free Theatre company to deliver their lines in a theatre. In Belarus, they mount secret, scratch performances in homes or even in the woods - not because they are devotees of site-specific work but because the authorities have banned their activities. The restrictive regime does not favour theatrical performances that encourage thought. They are brave to continue and brave, too, to bring their work to Britain.

Their very stark experience of how much drama can matter - both to those who want it performed and those who don't - gives a keen edge to their performances. Being Harold Pinter, an assemblage of extracts from Pinter's work and testimony from Belarusian political prisoners, is intelligent and moving, performed with striking and effective simplicity.

The piece (in Russian with English surtitles) begins and ends with Harold Pinter's speech on accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, with the questions it raises about the relationship between theatre and politics, art and truth. The company salutes Pinter's observation of unpalatable truths in drama by delivering excerpts from his plays, tracing his analysis of brutality in verbal exchanges - from the domestic sphere in The Homecoming to the political in Mountain Language.

The effect is a gradual darkening of mood as we see threatened brutality turn overt. The cast wear black suits and white shirts, and Vladimir Scherban's staging is lucid and uncluttered, so that simple effects have a big impact: someone stamping on an apple and smashing it to pulp has a clear and dreadful resonance.

Torture is suggested rather than depicted: in one passage, a small boy is terrified then brutalised by his interrogator - we know he is small because the actor holds a pair of child's laced shoes. Throughout, the company performs without sentiment but with a rigour that is most moving. Finally they bring art and life together by switching between extracts from Pinter's Mountain Language, in which the mountain people's native tongue is forbidden, so silencing them, and excerpts of testimonies from Belarusian political prisoners. Drama gives these prisoners an international voice, quietly demonstrating the vital political role of theatre in action.

Source:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2fc2a148-dbe2-11dc-bc82-0000779fd2ac.html

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