Burning Doors (Belarus Free Theatre)

I begin this review with a disclaimer: I shall not be giving a star rating. This isn't because Belarus Free Theatre's confronting portrait of politically and physically brutalised artists, Burning Doors, isn't deserving of praise. Far from it. However, it would be wrong to judge this show as an act of entertainment. This production is many things - a protest; a documentary; an instigation - but entertaining, it is not.

It is, however, powerfully engrossing, albeit not always comfortably so. Devised and directed by Natalia Kalida and Nicolai Khalezin, it grabs the audience's attention in a headlock with its combination of verbatim and stylised - often wordless - accounts of oppression, incarceration, and State-sanctioned violence. This highly physical, gestural vernacular could potentially come across as eye-rollingly pretentious, if not for its unignorable authenticity. Everything in this performance is delivered with such urgent conviction that this, in itself, says much about the deep, terrible truth at the core of what we are being shown.

The intensity with which this company performs seems a necessary reaction to the relatively sterile context of a conventional performance space. The founding members of Belarus Free Theatre are all political refugees, now based in the UK, forced to remain outside their native country or face Government reprisals for their protests. An underground branch of the BFT continues to perform in Minsk as a guerrilla troupe, using car parks, abandoned buildings or forest clearings as their theatre. The threat of being raided, with both performers and audience members subject to arrests, is very real. Given that the simple act of attendance carries such a burden of risk, these Belarus-based performances must surely come pre-charged with an innate defiance. Transplanting a production into the safe surrounds of the Arts Centre's Fairfax Studio, and theatre spaces like it, requires an even more furious energy to communicate the life-and-death significance of this company's revolt.

There are three rusting cell doors on stage, representing the imprisonments of three artist-activists. Maria Alyokhina of punk band Pussy Riot, who also appears in the performance, was sentenced to three years jail time for "hooliganism" after an anti-Putin protest performance in an Orthodox cathedral. "Actionist" Petr Pavlensky, a self-mutilating demonstrator whose protests have included nailing his scrotum to the cobbles of Red Square and sewing his own mouth shut, was arrested for setting the doors of a Government office on fire. Filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who along with three other activists was tortured by Russian police to extract incriminating testimony, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for alleged terror offences. He still has 18 years left to serve.

The experiences of these three individuals become the anchors for a broader conversation about the corrupt autocracy that exists in Russia. Scripted vignettes of shoptalk between two government officials - at a bar, on the toilet or at a football match - show the chilling flippancy with which life-altering decisions are casually made; lives destroyed by water-cooler chitchat. Eerily prescient quotes from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot or Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita, reveal how social and intellectual subjugation is entrenched in the Russian psyche. Choreographic (emphasis on the 'graphic') representations of torture, based on the testimony of Oleg Sentsov, retain so much barbaric reality that they are appalling to watch, deliberately so.

Not every scene of Burning Doors is successful, an awkward audience Q&A with Alyokhina stands out as an especially misjudged moment, but to quibble over such shortcomings would be missing the point. This is a show that deals with specifically Russian stories and yet, as populist rhetoric becomes ever more mainstream, there is a genuinely terrifying familiarity to the sentiment. Or, put another way, this is political theatre at its most humanist. "I do not want our leaders to be criminals anymore," flashes up on the projected surtitles, as the image of Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson and Nigel Farage duly flashes across my mind. "We are all afraid, but it's what we do with that fear that matters." The resonance of that statement could hardly be more striking.

To me, the unflinching honesty of Burning Doors is the most incisive rebuttal I can imagine for Trump's recent Twitter tantrum admonishing the Broadway cast of Hamilton for their well-mannered pleas for protection and safety. When the Prez-elect proclaimed that the theatre must be a "safe place", what he clearly meant is it should be a place where authority and audiences are never challenged, a place where freedom of speech should stick to the trite, pandering glitz of mass-market conformity.

Artists take note: in our post-fact world, Belarus Free Theatre reveal how vital it is that the truth be protected on our stages.

Belarus Free Theatre presents Burning Doors, at Arts Centre Melbourne until 3 Dec.