After debuting A Response to Kathy Acker: Minsk 2011 at Edinburgh last summer, Belarus Free Theatre is back in the UK to perform the show as part of LIFT. The company has suffered years of censorship and repression in their home country, being forced to perform in secret locations with many of the performers and their audience arrested. I met Natalia Koliada, co- founder and director of the company, at the Young Vic where the newest version of their piece opens on June 12th. She and her husband, Nikolai Khalezin – also a co-founder and director of the company – are now living in exile in the UK with their children.
Natalia Koliada, co-founder and director of Belarus Free Theatre. Photo: Nikolai Khalezin
In some ways, she tells me, she is glad to be in Britain, because British playwrights have been so crucial to the company’s development: “British writers are unique in connecting the civil position and art. British artists vocalise the problems that exist in their society. Writers here don’t wait for inspiration; everybody knows how to go really deeply into the issue – it is an absolutely amazing school for us.”
Throughout their career the company has used the voices of other playwrights to find a way of speaking about their situation: “We started with British playwrights – they gave us a chance to understand how we need to talk about ourselves. What Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill were writing about reflected our situation. It was a major turning point to speak about ourselves using their voices.” Yet none of the 27 state-run theatres in Belarus (all theatres are state-run in Belarus) would stage their production of Sarah Kane’s Psychosis 4.48: “In Belarus it is not possible to talk about sexuality, mental issues or suicide. They say it doesn’t exist in Belorussian society.”
In order to create a space for freedom of expression, the husband and wife team set up the Free Theatre and began to experiment with other writers: “After Sarah Kane we began working with Belarusian playwrights in a show called We: Self Identification. We collaborated with writers who were forbidden to work in Belarus and looked at issues of national self-identification. There was some very juicy stuff; one of our writers spent a week building with workers on the construction of a library and wrote a piece based on his experience. There were no normal words, It was only strong language because this is the way our workers talk. These performances gave us a chance to think about ourselves and our national identity.
“Later, Tom Stoppard, who has been a patron from the very beginning of our existence, came to Belarus in 2005 and said ‘You should look at Harold Pinter’s plays, they are about you.’ It took us two years to get to the point where we could see this; we had been thinking of ourselves in terms of British young playwrights and it took us a while to start thinking about ourselves in terms of violence. Pinter knew the nature of violence better than anyone else. Pinter went to Kurdistan to protest with the people there, so he knew about violence not from stories but through his personal experience. When he was writing ‘Mountain Language’ (a play, inspired by this trip to Turkey and Kurdistan, about a repressed people whose language is forbidden) we felt like he was in Belarus and writing about us because our language too is prohibited.”
The group used Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech as part of a performance in New York and exhibited real letters from political prisoners in Belarus alongside it. Koliada feels a great responsibility to speak out for those in her home country who do not have a voice, “yet when we are told over and over again that we are political theatre, I get tired of it. It is possible to talk about many issues here, but in Belarus everything becomes political. Because all these taboo zones they just ‘Boom.’ Sexuality – not possible, World War II – not possible, religious minorities – not possible, sexual minorities – not possible. It is not that nobody wants to discover, but it is dangerous to discover.”
