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It’s an anniversary they’d rather not be celebrating. For 20 years, Belarus Free Theatre has made vital, vivid political theatre resisting repression and challenging authoritarian regimes both in their own country and beyond. Banned by the Belarusian authorities, the company’s earliest works were staged underground; its founding artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, have lived in exile since 2011; and since 2023 it has had no presence in Belarus at all. Many of its artists have been persecuted or imprisoned. And the regime rolls on. BFT’s 20th anniversary production, K6: Small Forward, arrived in London just days after Alexander Lukashenko was returned to office for a seventh time in a presidential election widely denounced as a “sham”.
K6 is a slam-dunk of a show: a vibrant, intimate story of political awakening about, and performed by, star Belarusian basketball player Katsiaryna Snytsina. It carries a timely message about being alert. And, as with many of BFT’s shows, there’s a playfulness to it. The first thing you notice is a hoop, suspended high above the polished wood stage. Will Snytsina shoot? You bet she will. She arrives, loping around the arena, spinning a ball with that mesmerising dexterity that natural athletes have, casually netting it as she chats to us.
The show, directed by Kaliada and Khalezin, channels the upbeat, breezy atmosphere of a basketball game. Absurdly dressed mascots fire bubbles into the crowd, encourage kiss-cam poses and singalongs, and mount a sporting challenge for brave audience members; DJ Blanka Barbara provides a soundtrack of driving beats. Snytsina unfolds her story, partly through a series of cringey chat-show interviews with a matey presenter.
But running through the perkiness is pain. Memories of carefree childhood games and barbecues with her basketball-playing parents give way to more gruelling accounts of relentless Soviet-era training regimes. A screen on which we watch videos of Snytsina smiling with the Belarusian national team later displays grim footage of protesters being beaten and dragged into vans, of the statistics of people imprisoned for daring to speak out. Physical sequences in which Snytsina surges forward, restrained by huge elastic resistance bands, or is trapped in a narrow Perspex box and drowned in a torrent of basketballs, become stark, eloquent symbols of police brutality.
Snytsina’s apolitical, basketball-playing bubble was pierced by the 2020 mass protests in her homeland: a watershed moment for her. She stopped playing for her country, became an activist and is now unable to return, labelled “an extremist lesbian”. On stage, she has great charisma and an easy, gentle rapport with the audience, but she’s also disarmingly frank about her own late awakening.
“What was I doing before the protests? Why have I never dedicated a moment to public life?” she chastises herself. Given the current rise of the far right and authoritarian leaders, that self-rebuke rings out like a sombre warning.
★★★★☆
Tour continues to Norway, Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival, March 13-29, and to Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg in June, belarusfreetheatre.com
