The State We're In

To see how powerful theatre is, turn around and leave Edinburgh. Instead, take a two hour plane ride from London to Minsk and attempt to stage a Harold Pinter play or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in the capital of Belarus. Rather than five-star reviews and chin-stroking analysis, torture, imprisonment and rape await those who do.

This is the history of Belarus Free Theatre, the underground company who stood up to Europe’s last dictator with a canon of some of the most inventive, startling and brave plays written in the past decade. Now effectively in exile, the troupe is staging its first ever Fringe show in conjunction with Edinburgh veterans Fuel.

Rewind five years. Playwright Tom Stoppard sits in a small backstreet bar in Minsk. The country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko has just been elected for a third term. Stoppard has come to meet the country’s young playwrights. He shares a drink and his thoughts with theatre producer Natalia Kaliada. Minsk, he says, is utterly empty, yet expectant.

“Everything here is like a set ready to be filmed in a movie or performed in theatre,” he tells her. “But the people don’t come up on stage.”

Kaliada sips her drink and agrees. “You don’t feel alive here,” she says. “There is no life. It is as if it has just stopped.”

A year prior to Stoppard’s visit, Kaliada had begun to apply jump leads to her home country and to repopulate its stage and streets. In 2005, together with her husband Nikolai Khalezin and director Vladimir Scherban they formed Belarus Free Theatre.

Kaliada’s inspirations were Czech playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel and the Polish theatre groups who used their art to subvert and challenge Communist rule in the last century. And in filling the deserted theatrical space, initially with the works of Kane and Pinter but latterly with their own work, Belarus Free Theatre has tested this former Soviet state’s censorious reflex.

Perched between Russia and Poland, Belarus is a land trapped in pre-perestroika amber. The chill wind of Cold War paranoia still blows here.

It meant Belarus Free Theatre performed in secret. Audience members would be alerted via text or email of where to meet. Woods, cafes and people’s apartments all played host. At the Fringe, this is a quirky affectation – in Belarus this meant survival. Company members have been kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured. Kaliada was detained for 18 hours last December following the protests over Lukashenko’s rigged re-election. Her guards threatened to rape her. All members of Belarus Free Theatre had to smuggle themselves out of the country to avoid being apprehended. In total more than 1,000 people were arrested in the crackdown.

Minsk 2011, which sees its world premier in Edinburgh this month, will be the first artistic fruits from the company since their escape. They have performed in New York, Chicago, London and Hong Kong since December but always with old work, such as their award-winning Bring Pinter and Discover Love.

“In the last six months we were not able to work and produce new pieces because of the whole situation – my husband was in hiding, our manager was arrested, I was arrested,” says Kaliada. “It was endless. People were trying to understand the next stage of their lives – would we be in jail or not? Even in London we got threats and were told to watch our backs. It is not even safe here for me.

“But now this is the moment we wait for. Our dream is to produce new performances. We are alive when we perform - and we perform to be alive. It is the main moment for us.”

Devised with Fuel, Minsk 2011 is inspired by a Kathy Acker short story, New York City in 1979. In it, the late Acker describes her city like a fever: “No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness [comes] out like life is a terrific party.” This was the pre-sanitised New York: a city full of fading disco beats and Studio 64, of an aging Andy Warhol and junked-up Sid Vicious, of the fictional Travis Bickle and the all too real Mark David Chapman. Just like contemporary Minsk, apparently.

“Acker was discovering the society, politics, and the social problems through the sexuality of a person,” says Kaliada. “Everything that was happening in the revolution in 1979 is happening in Belarus. We’re trying to understand that if people do not explain themselves, maybe there is a black hole inside.”

Belarus Free Theatre does not lack for celebrity backers. In addition to support from Stoppard, Jude Law and Kevin Spacey have helped stage fundraising shows in London. Steven Spielberg and Mick Jagger are fans. Hillary Clinton even requested a meeting with Kaliada in January to discuss the situation in Belarus.

Now all the company want is for European politicians to take as much interest in Belarus as artists and the American administration.

“After the Arab Spring, it is time for the world to start to react to Belarus,” says Kaliada. “The last dictator in Europe is selling weapons to countries like Libya and Iran. I can’t understand why the world doesn’t pay attention to European countries. We understand that there is no political interest in our country – we don’t have oil, we don’t have gas. We just have people.”