Belarus Free Theatre: Dogs of Europe

The members of Belarus Free Theatre have been persecuted, arrested, exiled, spied on and slandered by the regime of dictator Lukashenko for many years now. Always in danger and always impoverished, their robust physical theatre style is fed by a burning anger at the death of freedom in their country. The title of this work comes from Auden's poem on the death of Yeats: "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark / And the living nations wait / Each sequestered in its hate."

Seeing them as the Ukraine took a battering from Putin's war brought a whole new tragic resonance to their work and the performance I attended was greatly enhanced by a pre-performance talk with the founder, Nicolai Khalezin, and his wife, Natalia Koliada, who directs this piece. Both have had political asylum in the UK since 2011 and both gave emotional updates on the plight of company members and friends suffering in Belarus and now swept up in the Ukraine war. All the actors have been imprisoned at some stage and are now in an even more heightened state of trauma.

The piece is a free adaptation of Alhierd Bacharevic's mammoth novel set in a dystopian Europe of 2049. It was first performed in clandestine gatherings in Minsk in 2019 where crowds of supporters turned up despite fear of arrest. In the novel, most of Asia has fallen under a secret service dominated Russian "Reich", while an ever more fragmented western Europe grapples with a refugee crisis. This is a detail which thankfully hasn't come to pass with the Ukraine as, far from fragmenting, the 'West' has never been more united in swift condemnation and action.

This piece, which runs three and a half hours, fuses epic fantasy with political thriller and has a brutal visceral energy. It challenges us not to be complacent about the dangers of looking away when authoritarianism takes root.

It does suffer, however, from sensory overload and an emphatic, bombastic style that never really helps us to get any purchase on the novel's core ideas. Far too episodic, it unfolds often as a series of skits, all presented against a huge backdrop of constantly changing but cluttered visuals. The style is broad, with pratfalls and cartoonish violence, and discordant musical numbers with acrobatic movement sequences, borrowing from rap, folk, and flamenco. Every theatrical device is pulled from the drawer but is used with ever diminishing returns. Flippant ideas are laid on with a trowel too, such as sexually decadent west Berliners in their slutty chiffon or bookshops being trashed by Philistine owners because "nobody reads any more". There's even a naked Sisyphus character straining to push a large ball constructed from crushed diaries. A slow 'running gag'.

While all this is initially striking it never coalesces to generate the emotional punch this subject matter requires. By the last section, a rambling exposition seemingly lifted straight from the novel, we are at a loss because no work has been done to establish characters. This concerns an agent sent to Berlin to investigate the mysterious murder of a man, found in a hotel bearing a book of poems and a goose feather. Was he a goose turned human?, one character asks. Indeed.

The question here is how do you translate such tremendous suffering into art without merely passing on the trauma? To even review it in current circumstances seems churlish. The case is very urgently made in the speeches, not the drama, that Belarus and Ukraine weren't taken seriously enough for far too long and we're now dealing with the consequences.

While this production may puzzle UK audiences unfamiliar with the epic poetry of the source material, we must hope that artists as brave as these ones survive and return in better times to share their world with us.

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