BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

18/02/2008

Being Harold Pinter/Generation Jeans

Michael Billington

The Guardian

Political theatre is often a matter of choice for British artists. For the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, you feel it is a creative necessity. It is their only means of registering a protest against a dictatorship that seeks to deny them a living and subjects them to endless harassment. But what strikes me about the two shows they have brought to London is their wit, vitality and inventiveness.

The first show, a kaleidoscopic collage drawn from five Pinter plays and his Nobel speech, is filled with extraordinary images. The two interrogators in The New World Order zip and unzip their flies within close earshot of their hooded victim. In One for the Road, a female power-figure runs a naked flame up and down the bare body of a male captive. If Pinter's verbal violence is rendered physically explicit, these actors have earned that right. First-hand testimony from victims of state brutality also reminds us, in Vladimir Scherban's dazzling production, that Pinter's political plays carry a different, dynamic charge in Belarus.

I found Generation Jeans equally moving. An autobiographical monologue performed by its writer, the ponytailed Nikolai Khalezin, it starts amiably enough by reminding us that bootlegged jeans and records are both a symbol of defiance and a source of illicit trade in a repressive system. In a line that might have come out of Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, he says of his generation, "We wanted to know everything about Mick Jagger and nothing about the Communist party."

With skill and subtlety, Khalezin goes on to describe his own arrest after a demonstration in 1998. He describes his claustrophobic horror at being placed in an 80x80cm cell, and how the experience was made even worse by the fact that he had recently fallen in love. Played against a seamless background of pop music, controlled by an on-stage DJ, Khalezin's testimony is as honest about himself as it is unsparing in its description of the degradations of confinement. You go to the theatre to hear a story; you end up having met a man who, in his mixture of self-mockery and seriousness, shows a spiritual resilience that makes dictatorship look even more inflexible and absurd.

Source:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/reviews/story/0,,2257665,00.html

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