Globe to Globe Blog: Much more than just a bonkers eastern European production

Dan and Giles
were at Shakespeare’s Globe to see a Belarusian King
Lear.

GILES:
A thing is either free or it’s not. Bird. Water. Whatever. I always
pause for a fraction of a second whenever I see a dog on a leash.
I’ll never quite get used to it I don’t think. But how free are
we actually? Can you go and do whatever you want, right now? Walk
into any building or place? Sit wherever you like? Tonight’s show
spat these questions up for us. What is
freedom? In The Tempest Caliban sings: “Thought
is free…”. King Lear casts everything off and bowls out into the
wilderness when his universe starts crashing around him. Dies in the
end but achieves a kind of freedom in the process. Shakespeare’s
most extreme play. Titus Andronicus may be a
bloody gorefest but in Lear everyone gets their
souls torn apart. Men and women go as far as they can go in this
play. It’s the human condition totally on fire and you can put it
on as a kind of Father Christmas fairytale or you can go after the
play. Tonight Belarus Free Theatre went for the play.

DAN:
Back home this play could get them killed. To speak Edgar’s closing
lines – “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” –
could hardly cost more to the actor brave enough to say it in
Belarus. Belarus Free Theatre was formed as a means of resisting the
censorship and pressure of the authoritarian regime of Alexander
Lukashenko and his boys. They have been brutalised, arrested. They
perform in streets, in people’s houses, in cafes, fields.
Performing Harold Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Tom Stoppard, Sarah
Kane. When they perform they are performing for
their
lives. Since then they have become the darling cause of all
right-minded liberals around the Londons and New Yorks of this
world.

GILES:
This is only an attempt to describe what we saw last night. Really it
defies commentary. At first glimpse you’d say it was a good old
fashioned, bonkers eastern European production. “I bet someone’ll
come out wearing wellies”, Dan says as the place fills up. “I
wonder how long it’ll take before someone gets naked”, I reply.
Didn’t have to wait long for either. The entire cast were in
wellies. There was an upright piano on stage. An accordion (of
course). The daughters sang and wore fur
coats.

DAN:
Whenever Lear kissed one of them it was a sort of tongue snog.
Someone was in a wheelchair. He pissed sitting down while Edmund
tried to catch the piss in a jar. Edgar, in transforming himself into
Poor Tom, reached down into his pants and produced shit, which he “begrimed” himself with.

GILES:
Everyone on stage was naked at one point. I actually saw a guy’s
hairy areshole. It was at that point my understanding of the whole
experience shifted. The Globe was rammed and I’d say a third of the
audience found it all a bit much. Once the genitals started coming
out the woman next to us – who was up a couple glasses of Pinot –
started tutting to her city husband. This couple’s experience then
began to fascinate me as much as the production. At one point she
lent over to him and said: “I love the fur coats”. They shifted
and tutted and sighed and got distracted all the way through the
first half. And I realised it wasn’t so much the poo that got to
them as the fact that they were not getting what they wanted from
this night out. They hadn’t come for poo. They’d come for
something safer. Something less frightening and definitely less close
to home. In Hamlet Shakespeare says we must hold a
mirror up to nature. Well, who the hell wants to sit and look in the
mirror for three hours? Only those who see the truth as a vital part
of human life. It was as if the Belarus Free Theatre were saying, no
one in the play gets off lightly so why the fuck should you?

DAN:
I’m not sure whether they included he lines that always get me. I’d
like to think they did…

KING
LEAR

Come,
let’s away to prison:
We
two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

When
thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

And
ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

And
pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At
gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk
of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

Who
loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

And
take upon’s the mystery of things,

As
if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,

In
a wall’d prison

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