Based on the novel by: Alhierd Bacharevic
Director: Nicolai Khalezin
Co-Director: Natalia Kaliada
Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe about a new Russian Empire couldn’t be more timely. Set in 2049 when Russia has crowned a new Tsar, one man tries to escape the new superstate while another man searches for the traces of a Belarusian poet in the newly formed League of European States. Based on Alhierd Bacharevic’s dystopian novel of 2017, this play may predict our future.
Of course, Ukraine is not the only country that Russia wants back in its pockets. Despite its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, Belarus has moved closed to Russia over the years and more recently allowed Russia to attack Ukraine from its borders. In 2020, there were riots in Belarus against the vote rigging that gave President Alexander Lukashenko his sixth term in office, a victory that some of the world doesn’t recognise. Most of Belarus Free Theatre’s cast and crew are now exiles and each has faced violence and jail time for their resistance against the dictatorship.
In 2049, Belarus has disappeared completely in the new Russian Empire that now takes in Finland and Afghanistan. Few people remember Belarus and one bookseller in Paris doesn’t even know how to pronounce it. The Russians have renamed most of the Belarusian villages and many have been named White Dews.
It is in White Dews 13, where our story begins. The tiny village is filled with eccentric characters. There is Mauchin, a quiet 15-year-old schoolboy who smells of geese living with his father, the one-armed accordion player. And there is the strange hunchbacked Mr Kakouski who doesn’t believe that the year in 2049. When a young woman falls from the sky, it seems that we are in the terrifying world of fairy stories.
Belarus Free Theatre tells its story with music, movement and a big dollop of European absurdism. When the characters have conversations they must be doing something else at the same time, be it fighting, getting drunk or having sex. For the audience, it’s a dizzying experience to watch the swirl of actors on stage while still trying to negotiate the surtitles on the screen behind.
A giant nest of tables is wheeled on and off the stage, books are burned and potted trees stand in for forests. The set’s simplicity is deceiving as it often looks stunning, especially when paired with Roman Liubyi’s film that plays constantly in the background giving chapter numbers and extra detail to the story’s many locations. It’s chilling to discover after the show that Liubyi is this moment trapped in Ukraine.
On stage for most of the three-hour plus running time, including the interval, is Aliaksei Naranovich who plays both the schoolboy Mauchin and the German agent in search of poetry and meaning. He’s also very fit too; running across the stage, dancing and hauling himself on and off the giant tables that stand in for everything from bars to hotels, to bookshelves and autopsy tables. The rest of the cast members play a variety of roles, all comic and surreal.
Mark Marczyk and Marichka Marczyk, last seen in the VAULTS festival’s Counting Sheep bring the soundtrack, a heady mix of Slavic folk mixed with rap and drum and bass. Counting Sheep, written by the couple, told the story of the Ukrainian uprising of 2014; it must be hard for them now to perform in a show like Dogs of Europe that arrives like a prophecy. Marichka’s voice, which fills the Barbican auditorium, is undoubtedly a lament.
As the title suggests, Dogs of Europe isn’t really about Russia at all. It’s a call to Europe to wake up and start believing and reading again. In the West we don’t think that poetry can make anything happen. Perhaps Yeats was the last poet who thought that poetry could change the world, but in the elegy by W. H. Auden are the words ‘For poetry makes nothing happen’. Let’s hope that Belarus Free Theatre’s exciting, and overblown play has the ability to inspire change. Auden wrote his poem for Yeats at the start of World War Two where ‘in the nightmare of the dark/ All the dogs of Europe bark.’ Can you hear them barking now?
Reviewed 11 March 2022
