★★★☆☆
As the interval began, a naked man was running in frantic, breathless circles around the stage. More than a quarter of an hour later, as members of the audience filed back in, he was still going strong.
This performance by the Belarus Free Theatre was never going to be conventional. Over the course of more than three hours, a series of dream-like tableaux, interspersed with evocative music and dance, took us on a journey into the unknown.
An eloquent political statement awaited as we arrived at the start of the evening: every seat was occupied by a photograph of a political prisoner. That gesture was, to be frank, much more direct than much of the opaque story-telling in this adaptation of a dystopian novel by the Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevic.
Moving from 2019 to 2049, it asked us to imagine a Europe confronted by a Russian superstate, provocatively described as a “new Reich”. Belarus itself had been consigned to the memory hole. What might once have seemed an outlandish idea when the piece was first performed seems prescient now.
After being forced to mount their productions in secret locations, the members of the company have gone into exile as they continue their campaign of resistance against their country’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. As Sir Tom Stoppard put it in tonight’s programme note: “You can be sure of one thing — Belarus Free Theatre are the good guys.”
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Not that the director Nicolai Khalezin’s production — staged with surtitles — was easy for a foreign audience to digest. But if the flood of words tested our concentration to the limit, the clever use of video projections was ample compensation.
On a bare set there was room for our imaginations to roam free. And there were echoes of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Fahrenheit 451, as Khalezin sketched a world in which the act of reading had become a rarity. The elegiac images of bookshops culminating in a visit to that Parisian landmark, Shakespeare and Company, caressed the eye. Elsewhere, references to Diderot, Goethe and Schubert flitted past.
Yes, the piece was overlong and self-indulgent. But at a time like this, it’s good to be reminded that theatre exists beyond our comfortable shores. Sadly, in the pre-performance talk hosted by the civil liberties campaigner Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, we learnt that Bacharevic had been unable to attend this show because he had not been able to obtain a visa. Red tape strikes again.
barbican.org.uk
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