The Belarus Free Theatre, or when politics meet theatre

In a small black-box theatre of a university campus somewhere in the North of England, last Friday, I had one of the most intense and most probably unforgettable theatrical experiences ever. I have never heard of them before but there they were in front of me, three women and four men, the members of the Belarus Free Theatre performing Being Harold Pinter, a collage of Harold Pinter’s recent political plays and his Nobel Prize Speech.
On a bare stage, with very few props but very intense performances from all seven actors, the linguistic, sexual, mental, physical and psychological violence and oppression that characterise plays such as One for the Road, Ashes to Ashes, Mountain Language, The New World Order combined with the playwright’s angry outcry for ‘human dignity’ in his October 2005 Nobel speech, came alive and left us all, academics, theatre scholars and members of the audience dumb-founded. What started as a piece about how Pinter’s characters come to life, how they dictate their actions and the playwright can do nothing else but obey them, turned into an almost autobiographical piece of the performers about their lost freedoms and constantly violated civil rights in Belarus. The piece finished with some of the true stories/letters of prisoners in Belarus at the moment, people who are not able to talk in their own Mountain Language.
The actors, director and producers of the piece talked to Harold Pinter and all of us after the end of the show; they explained how they are constantly chased by the regime, how they have to perform in small clubs and private spaces- apparently in order to rehearse the piece we saw, they had to change 20 flats because they were constantly on the run to escape the regime. The actors have lost their jobs in the 25(!) State Theatres of Belarus, some of them have been put in prison once or twice, a friend of theirs has been kidnapped and still missing. But what was extraordinary about these people, true dissidents, was that they did not show any self-pity even when one of the two producers started crying, remembering of their missing friend; there they were standing, determined individuals and artists, explaining to us how things are in Belarus and what they do about it.
And I kept thinking, going back to the discussions in another conference I had attended some months ago in Helsinki: The theatre is local; what Harold Pinter’s plays mean to these actors cannot be the same to what they mean to me or the British audience. And that is what makes theatre contextual and deeply political, after all. But that is also what makes theatre global- the travelling plays in different contexts, in different moments, with different resonances.
As I was leaving the theatre, deeply moved and unable to speak, I stopped and looked at the stage once more: the only thing that was left in the front was a crushed apple- Pinter had asked some moments before ‘What is this?’ and the performers replied ‘freedom-crushed’.