Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot

...in Burning Doors with Belarus Free Theatre at Soho Theatre
 
"Belarus Free Theatre celebrated their 10th anniversary last year: a remarkable feat given that they are banned in their home country because of the political nature of their work. And this latest work shows them at their best. Focusing this time on the Putin regime, Burning Doors draws on the experiences of three artists, all of whom have been incarcerated: Maria Alyokhina (a member of Pussy Riot, who appears in the show), Russian political artist Pyotr Pavlensky and Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov (who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in Russia). It’s a scorching piece of theatre: uncompromising, urgent and angry.

The title alludes to one symbolic action by Pavlensky, when he set fire to the doors of the headquarters of the Russian Federal Security Service (he has also swaddled himself, naked, in barbed wire and nailed his own scrotum to the cobblestones in Red Square). The whole piece is charged by intense scrutiny of what art is and what its role can and should be under censorship. But underpinning it too is a restless examination of what “freedom” means if, either in or out of jail, you do not have freedom of expression.

In a sequence of short vignettes, performed in Russian and Belarusian with English surtitles, the piece (written and directed by Nicolai Khalezin) offers a rich mix of styles. There’s savage political satire here, as performers portray government aides puzzling over what to do with an artist such as Pavlensky; there’s also wry wit about the difficulty of making a show about making political art — having to articulate slowly “so people have time to read the surtitles”. This ironic self-awareness recurs throughout the piece: at one point the lights snap on and the company stages an impromptu interview with Alyokhina, taking questions from the audience.

But the passages that linger are physical sequences inspired by the artists’ experience of prison. The piece finishes with tributes to Sentsov, most memorably a silent, protracted duel during which one man repeatedly hurls the other to the ground, only for his victim to stagger, defiantly, back on to his feet — until, by the end, it is the aggressor who is most exhausted.

It’s a brilliant physical metaphor for the gruelling battle between oppressor and oppressed, and a celebration of resistance. It is performed, as is the whole piece, with blazing energy and commitment."
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times