BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
13/02/2008
Welcome to theatreland
The Guardian
Banned by the state, the Free Theatre of Belarus performs in secret locations and texts the venue to audiences. Every play could be their last. Mark Ravenhill reports
Drive down the main prospect of Minsk and you experience all the grand, intimidating swagger of high Soviet architecture. Tiny figures make their way along vast pavements, dwarfed by buildings that look as if they were made for giants. But pull away from the awesome display of the central route, and the roads gradually break up and decay. Within 10 minutes, you are driving along poorly lit dirt track, the housing a mess of crumbling brickwork and metal shacks.
To me, these shacks - unnumbered and unlit - all look the same. But my hosts know what we're looking for. We stop and get out of the car. The mood, which had been chatty, suddenly changes. In silence, we are led down a muddy path to the rear of the building, where a gathering of 30 or so people are speaking in low murmurs, lit only by the ends of their cigarettes.
After a wait in the damp night air, a door opens, and a young, cropped-haired woman ushers us into a tiny lobby. There's a piece of old carpet on the floor, a single naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The young woman's T-shirt announces the reason for our clandestine visit: The Free Theatre of Belarus.
We are given plastic bags to put over our muddy shoes, and led into a makeshift theatre. This is a bare space, but one that has been scrupulously prepared. The building, once a family home, has been stripped. The floorboards have been painted black, the walls painted white. There are a few benches made from planks and oil drums for the audience.
The Free Theatre has several such venues dotted around the city. Their performances are forbidden by Belarus's restrictive regime, which controls every aspect of life in the country, in a manner that has barely changed since the days when it was part of the Soviet Union. So the Free Theatre has to keep one step ahead of the authorities: audience members are kept on a waiting list of 1,500, and alerted to a performance by text message or email, at very short notice.
The mood tonight is tense but expectant. The predominantly young crowd includes a number of political dissidents, as well as several overseas visitors: a French documentary film-maker, a German theatre-festival programmer, a couple whose formal dress picks them out as figures from sympathetic western embassies. Although suppressed at home, the work of the Free Theatre is celebrated abroad, and part of an active underground arts movement here in Minsk.
The risks of this secret performance are very real. Most of the actors have already lost their day jobs at state theatres; for some, this meant losing their homes. Last August, at a performance of Edward Bond's Eleven Vests, cast and audience alike (including children) were all arrested. They were held for several hours, and only released - it is suspected - because there were several foreign visitors among them.
I have to admit, guiltily, to enjoying this feeling of fear as I wait for the performance to begin. My own playwriting career began in the mid-1990s, which makes me too young to have experienced the solidarity that an older generation of western playwrights felt for their compatriots behind the iron curtain. Coming to Minsk has allowed me to step into a peculiar time warp - and I have to keep reminding myself that this is real, not a theme park re-creation of a former time.
As the performance begins, it quickly becomes apparent that the Free Theatre's work is of an exceptionally high standard. Tonight we're seeing the first two parts of a trilogy called Hidden Voices. The first is a piece compiled from the childhood memories of the cast, the second from interviews with "outsiders": the gay, the disabled, the mentally ill - all of whom do not "exist" in the official Belarussian culture. (The third part of the trilogy is a work in progress.)
The actors have clearly benefited from the long, thorough training common in former Soviet countries. Most are aged under 30, and they have a stunning vocal and physical command, performing with ease and urgency material that combines both verbatim and physical theatre, as well as utilising projected video and still images of great beauty alongside pounding live music. Their young director, Vladimir Scherban, is an extraordinary talent.
Four years ago, comfortably posted in a state theatre, Scherban directed my 1999 play Some Explicit Polaroids. The production was cancelled after just one performance, when the minister of culture denounced it as pornographic. Scherban lost his job, and his apartment was taken away from him. "So you see, Mark," he says, "you ruined my life not just once but twice." I wince, although he's smiling.
Despite having lost his job, Scherban decided to stage Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis. He teamed up with Nikolai Khalezin and his wife, Natalya Kolyada, a writer-producer team with a long history of human rights activism. ("You should see Nikolai's KGB file," says Kolyada with grim amusement.
"A guy we tried to set up a magazine with was shown it. They've got boxes on him.") Khalezin had received a considerable advance for a play that he sent to the Moscow Arts Theatre, which was never produced. They decided to use this money to found the Free Theatre of Belarus.
Their first production was Kane's Psychosis; since then, the company has concentrated on new Belarussian work. "The authorities say there are no playwrights in Belarus," Kolyada says, "but we've been sent hundreds of plays." The company has just published a volume of new plays that it plans to send to every state theatre and library in the country (though whether these places will stock the book is another matter). "There's a huge demand. Young people contact us all the time asking: how can I get hold of a copy?"
As we wait for the second half of the trilogy to begin, I talk to a woman named Tatyana Leonovich. Her husband was a member of parliament during the brief period after Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, and before its transformation to a near-dictatorship following the election of Alexander Lukashenko in 1994. Leonovich's husband is serving his third jail term as a political prisoner, having made public speeches and written articles in support of free speech.
If you've been imprisoned once, I ask, what makes you speak out again? "I've asked myself this many times," Leonovich says, "and I've come to the conclusion that some people are simply heroes. My husband is such a hero. Does this make me a Penelope, waiting for my hero to return? No. I'm not so passive. I'm a trained lawyer and I fight for him every time he is in court."
Leonovich lost her job in a bank and her children have grown up in fear, knowing never to answer a knock at the door in case it is the authorities. As with everybody I speak to, I give her the opportunity to use a pseudonym, but she wants her real name in print. "Vaclav Havel taught us always to use our own names," Kolyada says. "That way, the authorities can see you're not frightened, and it unnerves them."
The next day, we are driving through Minsk when Kolyada receives a call on her mobile phone. It is bad news. The Free Theatre is preparing for a visit to England, with performances in London and Leeds this month - but now two of its actors, the only members of the company still employed by state theatres, have been refused permission by their bosses to travel abroad. "This is a new development," she says. "Before, we were always allowed to travel. In fact, I got the impression they were hoping we wouldn't come back. But now this. It's such a blow."
The company plans to perform two pieces in England: Being Harold Pinter, which intercuts some of Pinter's short plays with letters from Belarussian political prisoners; and Generation Jeans, a monologue by Nikolai Khalezin performed with a DJ, in which he asks the audience to join him in the chant "I am free". Will they still be able to present the same repertoire? "I just don't know," says Kolyada, beginning a series of frantic mobile phone calls. Finally one of the actors decides to defy her boss and come to London - making the performances here possible but endangering her job at home.
The Free Theatre members live at a dizzying pace. "We have to," shrugs Kolyada. "We all work 20 hours a day. If we didn't, if we stopped, we'd be overwhelmed by our situation and give up. Once, at an overseas festival, an audience member who didn't know what our situation was asked, 'Why do your actors play as if this is the last performance they will ever give?' We said, 'Because it may be.'" Vladimir Scherban nods: "There's no logic to our existence, but our theatre is a noble thing, a dream."
The company's many international supporters would agree. Tom Stoppard has proved an enthusiastic advocate, as has Mick Jagger; Harold Pinter lets the company perform his work anywhere in the world without paying royalties. "We met Pinter," says Khalezin. "He told us that Britain was a dictatorship, too. We listened in respectful silence and then we told him about our situation. He had to agree we had a far worse dictatorship." Khalezin laughs his habitual rich laugh and the rest of the company laugh with him.
The Free Theatre is full of plans for the future. There's the third part of the Hidden Voices trilogy to prepare, and a plan to invite foreigners from a range of non-theatrical disciplines - macrobiologists, economists - to visit and collaborate. Are they optimistic about the future of Belarus? "With our situation," Scherban says, "these words don't apply. There is no optimism or pessimism. We are living in hell and we are doing the best we can."
ú Being Harold Pinter and Generation Jeans are at the Soho Theatre, London W1, until February 23. Box office: 0870 429 6883. For details of the Leeds performances (February 25-27), see wyplayhouse.com
Source:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2255989,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
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