Soho Theatre Presents Belarus Free Theatre
9:39, — Culture
Soho Theatre presents the first major UK staging of work from The Belarus Free Theatre. Banned by the state in its homeland and renowned for staging covert and uncensored performances, The Belarus Free Theatre fights for democracy and artistic freedom, from 11 to 23 February.
In a country where all official theatre is state-run, the company is prohibited by the Belarusian authorities. Its audiences are contacted by mobile phone and bussed to secret performances. In August 2007, state forces stormed a performance in a private home and arrested over 50 people, including three children – an event which Tom Stoppard described as 'a grotesque attack on civil rights'.
The Belarus Free Theatre was founded by playwrights Nikolai Khalezin and Natalya Kolyada in March 2005. It has since performed at international festivals in the US and Europe, including appearances at the Pinter conference in Leeds in April 2007.
At Soho Theatre, the company performs two striking and visually inventive plays: Being Harold Pinter combines transcripts from Belarusian political prisoners with excerpts from Pinter's plays and his landmark speech to the Nobel Prize Committee. Generation Jeans is a ferociously satirical play about symbols of freedom in Belarus and the Denim Revolution, a term coined when demonstrators raised denim shirts in place of flags that had been seized by the police.
PEN is the world's only international fellowship of writers, working together to promote literature and defend the freedom to write. From campaigning on behalf of persecuted writers to promoting literature in translation and running writing workshops in schools, English PEN seeks to dismantle the barriers to creative express
Soho Theatre engages with London as a diverse and international city. It develops new work that challenges the status quo and celebrates inter-culturalism, free expression and social justice. Alongside The Belarus Free Theatre, the current season inlcudes work from Poland, Lebanon, US, Holland, and from across London and the UK.
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