An Exiled Theater With a Warning for Europe

LONDON — When the gamers of the Belarus Free Theater started engaged on “Canines of Europe” three years in the past, they thought it was a play a couple of dystopia.

Set in 2049, it imagines the continent minimize in half by a wall. On one aspect sits a Russian superstate, the place a dictator has eradicated virtually all opposition, and the place folks can not communicate their native languages and even carry out people dances. On the opposite aspect sits a Europe that failed to understand the Russian risk, or cease it from absorbing Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States and past.

But at a rehearsal in London final month the day earlier than Russia invaded Ukraine, the play’s nightmare world didn’t really feel so far-fetched.

Maryna Yakubovich, an actor within the manufacturing, which opens Thursday on the Barbican theater in London, mentioned that rehearsing the play had typically felt like a premonition. “It’s, like, ‘Oh my God, it’s began to occur,” she mentioned.

Natalia Kaliada, one of many Belarus Free Theater’s founders, mentioned that when she and her husband, Nicolai Khalezin, determined to stage the play, they thought it will be a “warning shot” in regards to the risks of undemocratic leaders left unchecked. However deliberate performances in London and New York in 2020 had been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now that warning shot seems to be too late.

Because the battle in Ukraine enters its third week, the Belarus Free Theater’s efficiency could seem unintentionally well timed. However it’s only the corporate’s newest try in its 17-year existence to warn about rising authoritarianism in Jap Europe.

The corporate is aware of these risks all too effectively. Since forming in 2005, it has confronted repression in Belarus, which is dominated by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who is called “Europe’s final dictator” partially for his authorities’s clampdown on opposition and its stifling of free expression. The troupe has lengthy been successfully banned from performing in Belarus, but it surely continued to take action in secret venues in Minsk, the capital, even after Kaliada and Khalezin had been compelled into exile greater than a decade in the past. The couple settled in London — the place they developed shut ties to theaters together with the Younger Vic and the Almeida — however continued rehearsing with actors in Belarus through Skype.

These clandestine reveals, in venues together with a transformed automobile storage that after belonged to the American Embassy, additionally gained the troupe high-profile supporters in america. In 2015, The New York Occasions’s chief theater critic, Ben Brantley, visited the corporate in Minsk, and praised its “spirit of defiant, exultant fraternity” including that this was one thing “you hardly ever discover among the many younger today in money-driven, shockproof Manhattan.”

Now, even that window to carry out in Minsk has closed. The theater’s complete 16-member performing troupe fled Belarus final yr to keep away from potential jail time for opposing Lukashenko’s regime.

The Belarus Free Theater was now homeless, Kaliada mentioned. “We’re refugees.”

She added that she had hoped its members could be granted asylum in Britain, so they may arrange a refugee-led theater there, however the course of can take years and asylum candidates are virtually all the time banned from working. After its four-performance run on the Barbican, the corporate would almost certainly arrange base in Warsaw, a metropolis with quite a few refugees from each Belarus and Ukraine, Kaliada mentioned, however added {that a} ultimate determination had not but been made.

The corporate’s funds are precarious, Kaliada mentioned, although she had a transparent imaginative and prescient for the long run. In addition to discovering a efficiency house, the corporate would set up a faculty the place its members may give performing lessons to refugee kids, she mentioned. All of its future performs could be live-streamed again to Belarus, so the corporate would maintain reaching folks there.

“It’s a fairly robust time,” Kaliada mentioned. “We’re attempting to unravel many points without delay.”

The corporate’s experiences over the previous two years present how shortly fortunes can change in Jap Europe. In August 2020, Belarus — a rustic of some 9 million folks — appeared on the verge of a turning level after Lukashenko declared victory in a vote extensively dismissed as fraudulent, resulting in mass avenue protests. It was a “lovely, highly effective,” second, Kaliada mentioned: It felt like her nation was waking from a foul dream, she mentioned.

Then a brutal police crackdown towards the protesters introduced these hopes to an finish.

A number of of the corporate’s actors had been arrested through the interval of repression across the election. Sveta Sugako, the corporate’s manufacturing supervisor, mentioned she spent 5 days in jail in a tiny cell with 35 different girls. None of them got any meals or consuming water for 3 days, she added. After Sugako refused to signal a confession saying she had taken half within the demonstrations, a police officer grabbed her and choked her, she mentioned.

Sugako mentioned she had not wished to go away Belarus, even after that have. “I used to be prepared to sit down and wait in jail,” she mentioned, however different Belarus Free Theater members persuaded her to go, stating that the corporate had no future if all of its actors had been behind bars.

On the latest rehearsal in London, the ambiance was muted. When not performing, the actors checked their telephones for information from dwelling.

“After all we’ve left Belarus, bodily,” Yakubovich mentioned, “however mentally we’re nonetheless there.” The information was “by no means good,” she added.

Then there was the scenario in Ukraine to take care of. Russia was utilizing Belarus as a staging floor for its looming invasion, and lots of firm members had fled Belarus through Ukraine, or had pals and family members there. Marichka Marczyk, a Ukrainian musician who performs a reside soundtrack for the present, mentioned she had simply acquired a textual content message from her brother in Kyiv, Ukraine, with directions if he was killed within the combating: “Burn my physique/scatter the ashes,” he wrote.

Roman Liubyi, a Ukrainian video animator engaged on the manufacturing, mentioned his spouse and 5-year-old daughter had been additionally in Kyiv. He was contemplating leaving rehearsals to get them out if a battle started, he mentioned, after which becoming a member of any struggle towards Russia.

Whereas her colleagues grappled with the information, Kaliada, a founding father of the corporate, watched from the sidelines.

She may image Russia absorbing each Belarus and Ukraine, she mentioned, simply because it did in “Canines of Europe.” But even when the corporate confronted a few years of exile, “Belarus is with us,” she mentioned. “We can have a house.”