As the lights go down at the end of See Me Now’s press night the audience rise collectively to their feet in outright admiration. This display of elation is not born out of left liberal values, but out of respect for the performers, for the gutsy real life stories they as an audience have just been witness to and the realisation of the emotional cost that telling such stories has for the ensemble.
The show is about the sex industry and is a Young Vic Taking Part production two years in the making with director Mimi Poskitt at the helm and in collaboration with High Tide and Look Left Look Right and is performed and developed by those that know it best- sex workers. Molly Taylor’s text is inspirationally episodic in nature and gives us elliptical and yet intimate real life portraits of the performers onstage and of those who have dropped out of the project, but still want their voices heard. We hear from men and women, transgender and intersex people all playing themselves. Yes, we all know that such shows that work with non professionals could risk being branded as “therapeutic” ( as if such a show should be contained somehow for its creativity and limited by its label? though I wonder what is wrong with therapeutic anyway? Therapy is a two way street after all) and also, in this case because of its multiple storytelling nature “lacking in character development” but to see the work merely through such prisms would be to do it an injustice and to misinterpret its genre. Why? First, because any show- and the same can be said of a show with professional actors- must be approached by the audience with the same spirit within which it has been created- and the spirit here is one of openness and informality. And second, its chosen genre must be embraced, even if, as happens here, it is a departure from it.
Audiences might come to the show because they are intrigued and curious about an industry that for so long this country has ideologically been in denial about and has pushed to the edge of society in order to make it invisible, impeding our growth towards a more just community and encouraging human rights abuses. Many might not normally have cause (or think so anyway) to venture into it, although if sex workers could be recognised as therapists (why not?) then we might all be the better for it. In terms of mystique, technical knowledge and humour it does not disappointment. Want to know how to fit a Holy Chastity Trainer device? Governess Elizabeth, who holds a PhD on the practice of chastity in male submissives, will give a full explanation. Curious about the psychological reasons behind why women and some men, hire escorts? Male gigolo Flynt will reveal all. There are also plenty of emotionally raw moments- particularly pertinent is B’s story about being transgender- tonight the stakes are raised when she reveals her dad is in the audience. We share all the performers’ emotions as they talk to us and the imaginative leap that we are required to take as they do so bounds us to them all the more. We hear a lot about the penis- a lot- and a bit less about the vagina and vulva and I kept wondering, what about the vagina? Are we still, collectively, squeamish about talking about vaginas?
There are also some political messages too and aside from the most obvious, one that puts our institutions to shame. It’s an illustration of just how willingly people will indulge themselves in behaviours that they also claim to be illegal or at best, immoral, if they are the law and have power. Notions of romantic victimisation and inclusive exclusion also become moral equivalents. We see and hear about how abuses of power occur by those meant to protect us.
Structurally the show may feel a little uneven, there is less about sex trafficking than there might be, but that’s a small price to pay for the overall honest and emotionally raw experience. The message that sex workers are people with their own problems too and are educated, wise and fearless may feel trite to some, but this country unfairly stigmatises them, sometimes seeing them as less than human and so leaving them unprotected (sex workers in Amsterdam have their own union for instance, no such luck here, though there are collectives). This must change and seeing this show and acknowledging the people in it could be the beginning of persuading hearts and minds. It’s hot, raw, outrageous fun and full of love and perhaps is paving the way for future shows like this to enter a broader, theatrical arena, as they should.
The show is on at the Young Vic until 4th March but is sold out. It is worth trying for returns though.
Some Russian critics “love to kill what they can’t control” wrote John Freedman in the Moscow Times in 2015. He continued: “Theatre, of course, is bigger and messier and more lively than all of us put together.” After four consecutive nights watching new Russian plays (little performed in the UK) translated by Noah Birksted-Breen at London’s Frontline Club—plays that are consciouslyabout the social state of Russia and her theatre, one could go away thinking Russia herself wants to kill what she can’t control. The question is whether and how this may happen. Is Russian theatre in peril? Sources comment that it is alive and kicking in the provinces, where most new plays are staged. But they are dystopian works “that define Russia as an unconquerable, forbidden, illogical country where any social experimenting is drowned in the mysticism, viscosity, and waywardness of the Russian soul.” The theatre critic Pavel Rudnev writes that Russia’s theatrical elders are expressing “anti-liberal” notes with stagings of some of Dostoevsky’s best-known works expressing the pointlessness of a revolutionary spirit . And the Putin government’s insistence on converting more and more theatres into state-run institutions and its pressure on private landlords who rent out space to the politically independent and outspoken theatres such as Teatr.doc must ring alarm bells. Softly, maybe, but ring they must.
A post-show discussion featuring Alexandrina Markov, Oliver Bullough, Vladimir Ashurkov, John Freedman, among others. Photo by Sophie Kayes.
On the first night of the play readings, a venture between the journalists’ charity, Plymouth Theatre Royal, and Sputnik Theatre, the choice of work, Doctor (Notes of a Provincial Doctor) was a good illustration of the present federation’s disintegration of social structures. The play explores how many hospitals in the Russian provinces are understocked, understaffed, or are being dismantled, often leaving patients with nowhere to turn. The play has been in rep at Teatr.doc for ten years as a result of its popularity with the medical community, in particular. Elena Iseva, the playwright, uses verbatim techniques to expound, word for word, the experiences of a doctor as he journeys from medical student to surgeon in rural Russia. Played with a hint of wistful yet slightly boorish sentimentalism by Alex Cox, drawing surely on Chekhov’s Mikhail Lvovich Astrov in Uncle Vanya or Tcheboutykin in The Three Sisters, Doctor (Notes of a Provincial Doctor) lays bare the sick, badly financed, and sometimes hilarious state of the Russian health system.
Reading of Zhanna. Photo by Sophie Kayes.
The reading of Zhanna the night after, by twenty-seven-year-old playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich, may, at first, seem to bear no connection. It’s a stark look at a self-made new Russian woman who outmaneuvers the mafia gangs in the lawless “pop, glamour, and gangster” period of the 1990s (the first chaotic decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union) to manage a small chain of boutiques, making herself wealthy in the process. We join Zhanna just as her toy-boy is about to leave her for his younger and pregnant “real love.” What follows is a hard-hitting account of Zhanna’s quest for revenge. While Zhanna has been commonly referred to by the critics as a “straightforward melodrama,” it charts an important psychological shift in Russia’s national character during Perestroika and the move from economic restraint to excess living in a “grab what you can” cultural moment.
If the first two plays deal with Russia’s immediate history, Grandchildren by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky, is an attempt to rationalize Stalinism. Dealing with territory written about so hauntingly and truthfully by Vassily Grossman in Life and Fate, the play offers testimonies from the grandchildren of those whose family members were Stalinists, in the NKVD, or members of the Communist Party. It deals with guilt, self-censorship, and with the need to excuse and the desire to forgive. It is original, for when do we hear about or from the relatives of mass murderers, executioners, or any kind of criminal offenders? Who tells their stories? They are often the ones forgotten in the mass outcry pitying victims and venting rage against the victors, and they are left to process the legacy of inherited guilt on their own, when in fact, one could argue, it should be a communal experience. But if this play is trying, in some small part, to do what the Nuremberg Trials did for Germany—to bring a country to face and therefore to reconcile with its past—the post-reading discussion, given by speakers Alexandrina Markov, Oliver Bullough, Vladimir Ashurkov, and John Freedman warned that Russia may be creeping back into the Soviet Era, not out of it. The fact that a new Stalin educational center has opened in Penza, Meyerhold’s birthplace, is not lost on Russia’s artistic community, yet it highlights a deep psychological conflict raised in the play. Russia has not processed Stalin and WWII, yet through censorship and political pressure (Putin’s version of Stalin is to be taught in schools for example) her government continues to inflict wounds on open sores before they have had a chance to be understood or heal, a typical old-style KGB tactic. Is Russia heading back into the dark murky days of the USSR?
In December 2014, Vladimir Putin signed a new cultural policy document detailing Russia’s “rejection” of the “principles of tolerance and multiculturalism.” It goes on to caution against arts and culture that diverge from Russia’s traditional values, stating, “No experiments with form can justify the substance that contradicts the values traditional for our society.” What must this do to a people?
Reading of The War Has Not Started Yet. Photo by Sophie Kayes.
The closing play, Mikhail Durnenkov’s The War Has Not Started Yet, commissioned by A Play A Pint & A Pie and the National Theatre of Scotland, perhaps has a preemptive imaginative answer—of sorts. Reminiscent of the style in Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, and premiering just as Russian troops occupied Ukraine, it is not about a war on a frontline, unless you see that line as a domestic one. Instead, using a large number of vignettes, it explores a variety of Russian characters suffering neurosis, psychosis, and schizophrenia as a result of what is happening to them in their own country. Characters are unable to function in a world that is increasingly lived through the pursuit of sensual fulfillment or, in equal amounts, internal and external oppression. They suffer mental and emotional overload and their natural human tendencies are suppressed, either by themselves or others. In the play, the characters fail to distinguish between what is real or not real (referring to Russian State TV’s tendency to fake news reports, or bend the truth of news stories to fit their agenda), they cross boundaries, abuse others, and look at the world through a filter of mysticism. One scene recounts a moment where a father feels that there is a connection between the simultaneous events of his son going missing and his ability to refrain from smoking at such a time of great stress. We don’t hear if the son is found and we presume that he is not. We realize that so many Russians are in jail, searching for meanings of their own, as the state’s official roads to truth dead end. Russia’s citizens look at their own lives and their country’s history, through the bars of state-led oppression.
What does the future look like for Russian theatre? It is unknown territory, though some fear one path may already have been laid out years ago in the Stalinist period. Teatr doc. itself is allowed to exist for the moment. But the authorities could shut Teatr. doc down if they wanted. Why don’t they? Perhaps it is something to do with why Putin invades other countries: he keeps himself in power by creating problems only he can solve. Perhaps the announcement that the Minister of Culture would vet new plays and since redacted because of a public outcry, was also a psychological trick. For now, though, Teatr.doc’s artistic director refuses to listen to what she calls the “whispers in her ear” or believe any “conspiracy theories” about the State’s real feelings about theatre, and the one she runs especially.
Putting in half measures against Russia’s artistic dissent by kicking Teatr.doc from building to building, yet allowing their plays to take place, or by threatening the censorship of new work but not following through with it, seems a fine line for the Russian government to tread and it forces the theatre world to be constantly on guard. Theatregoing in Russia is a serious business, though they reject it as a “time killing” enterprise. The 115 theatres in Moscow pride themselves on being almost completely sold out all of the time. Where else in the world does theatre matter as much as this? Putin is, for now, cutting just enough slack for theatre to survive as a much-muted place of dissent, but will it be enough for its people? Might they demand more? Theatre is “messier” and “bigger” than us, so it seems only time will tell.
This article was originally published by Howlround
Belarus Free Theatre’s theatrical laboratory Fortinbras’ provocations of pop up contemporary art and theatre shone a bright light through the chinks of the armor of Belarus’ dictatorship this past December in a cold and rainy Minsk.
Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) pioneer performance inspired campaigning, now, only months after Belarus signed the UN convention to protect the human rights of those with disabilities, Fortinbras’ students yielded the fruits of their own training to mount a series of “public actions, installations and performances across Minsk asking: ‘Why don’t we see people with disabilities around us?’”
Belarus Free Theatre and Fortinbras stand with the banned and the disabled are banned in Belarus. The theatre’s modes of theatrical practices have grown, by necessity, out of the stranglehold of Alexander Lukashenko’s continuing dictatorship. The time seems right to up the ante, Lukashenko was recently returned to power in what many believe to be rigged elections in October 2015. In a city run by the KGB, the only secret service agency opting to keep its name after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, how can such performance interventions affect the citizens of this oppressed municipal? The answer is to bring the disabled and impaired out onto the streets of Minsk and invite its citizens to look at, see, acknowledge, and accommodate difference. In a country which seems to function as a satellite state, where even the mention of Lukashenko’s name in derogative terms seems sacrilege, the time is ripe for such a move as NGOs and The Office for The Rights of Persons with Disabilities watch, over the next two years, to see how the government will fulfill its obligations set out in the UN convention. It’s a country where 50 percent of its people have said they are ready to integrate those with disabilities, but where 80 percent of those who are disabled are unemployed. You might say, Belarus is in the grip of uncertainty, it stunts itself when it embraces difference with only half hearted measures, it is plagued with anxiety when these measures are tested and are found wanting, it wishes to go forward but is caught in the throes of a dictatorship which forces the country to tread water.
writing 