In their home country, the founder members of Belarus Free Theatre face detention for protests against the regime. Since 2011 they have been political refugees in the UK. Meanwhile a permanent ensemble perform in Minsk, but underground: in garages, forests and car parks, where they are sometimes raided and audience members arrested. London theatres allow what Minsk does not: protest as performance.
In front of cell doors, rusty, with barred windows, they enact a series of scenes on the themes of injustice, incarceration and speaking out. Burning Doors draws on Dostoevsky, Michel Foucault and on the experiences of individual prisoners. The Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov is now in prison, where he has been tortured. Petr Pavlensky, performance artist and activist, sewed his mouth shut in protest at the imprisonment of the Pussy Rioters. One of the Pussies is also on stage. Maria Alyokhina is husky, direct, unvarnished.
A rather awkward Q&A – it was hard to know at first whether it was a setup or spontaneous – produced a salient question. Is this, a man asked, for us or for you? Alyokhina threw the question back to him and got the response: “We need it. But you need it more.”
That seems right. There is more expression than information on offer; I longed for some explanation and history. And yet there are magnetic moments: terrifying and haunting and sometimes wordless. As when a woman is bungeed high up above the stage stretched out like a starfish. Or when unaccompanied voices of men and women rise up in a doleful chorus. Or when, at the end, a single lightbulb is swung around the stage amid darkness. A good deed in a naughty world. And the cell doors are set on fire.
