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After wowing us with the widescreen onslaught of recent Barbican show ‘Dogs of Europe’, exiled theatre company Belarus Free Theatre are back with something very different.
I actually saw their semi-immersive show ‘The Master Had a Talking Sparrow’ five years ago in an anonymous suburban garage in Minsk. That was back when the company was banned in its home country, but not physically being persecuted enough to warrant stopping shows there (a state of affairs that has sadly changed). Then, it blew me away: a piece of rebel theatre specifically designed to keep memories of the nation’s troubled history alive in the face of ongoing government sanitisation. And the form is brilliant, a boozy birthday party in ‘70s Belarus, at which a group of friends and family played by the company argue about the ravages the Germans, Russians and – most controversially – Belarusian partisans (that is to say, locals who took up arms to form unregulated militia) inflicted upon the country during and around the Second World War.
Relocated to atmospheric West End arts centre the Stone Nest and staged – legally! – for a British audience, it has lost some of the potency that came with its original context. Nonetheless, it is still quite something. And it’s further notable as the only Belarusian eatery in central London: audience and actors are sat at a table groaning with smoked meats and pickled vegetables which we’re all expected to tuck in to, while toasts of ‘moonshine’ (I think it was watered down vodka, or some equivalent) are proffered regularly.
It’s more a wonderfully presented repository of stories than a play with a conventional narrative; such arc as there is involves the guests at the party becoming increasingly heated as they share conflicting memories of atrocities committed during the war. Performed in Belarusian with a slightly wonky simultaneous English translation, there’s an inevitable detachment from the subject if you’re going in as a foreigner. But the myriad accounts of casual horror should send shivers down any spine – both because they offer some insight into the appalling suffering of Eastern European civilians during the Second World War, and because inevitably it has ghastly parallels with the current Russian invasion of Ukraine (which are explicitly teased out in a late twist).
There is something intrinsically powerful about having the stories shared alongside a hearty family meal: the juxtaposition of dinner table chat and descriptions of unspeakable cruelty reflects the fine line between normalcy and catastrophe being described in the stories.
What came across more clearly in the original version is that these stories are now largely verboten in Belarus. As the generation that experienced the war has disappeared, so official Belarusian histories have whitewashed the atrocities committed by the Soviets, while the partisans are largely celebrated as heroes. The show – which draws from real-life oral accounts – is thus a sort of radical time-capsule, preserving a truth about Belarus’s history that’s increasingly forgotten. Given the not dissimilar themes of ‘Dogs of Europe’, it’s a shame that ‘The Master…’ isn’t more lucid about framing all this for a western audience, and maybe overdoes the Ukraine parallels at the end. Still, ‘Dogs of Europe’ was a big-budget collaboration with a huge international theatre; ‘The Master Had a Talking Sparrow’ is a tentative first attempt at transposing a show made for Belarusians to British theatregoers.
It’s a tiny bit rough, but the forgotten stories at its heart are ferociously powerful – and the hospitality is, frankly, five star.