Edinburgh Fringe looks east to human rights failings in the former USSR
Belarus Free Theatre's Trash Cuisine draws on conversations with executioners, inmates and their families to tell individual stories of capital punishment. Producer Natalia Kaliada acknowledges the subject is not an easy one to tackle, saying: “The challenge was finding the entry point for the audience as it's such a complex issue to take home with you.” It is a challenge also faced by Ines Wurth Presents' Who Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? and Badac Theatre Company's Anna, which complete a trio of productions coming to this year's Fringe that both highlight the human rights abuses prevalent in former-USSR countries, and serve as a call to action for their audience.
Belarus Free Theatre's approach was grounded in research trips to Rwanda, Uganda, Bangkok and Malaysia. The motivation for the piece, however, was found closer to home. Belarus is the last remaining European country to retain the death penalty, its most recent implementation of which was in March 2012, with the execution of Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kavaliou, condemned on charges of orchestrating an explosion in the Minsk underground in April 2011. According to the International Federation for Human Rights, the guilt of the men had not been established due to conflicting testimonies; Kanavalau's assertion that his confession was obtained using torture; the fact that neither motive nor circumstances were established, and that the proof on which the men were condemned has been destroyed by the court.
While Belarus Theatre Company tell the stories of powerless young men like Kanavalau and Kavaliou, Ines Wurth uses a higher profile figure to command his audience's attention in Who Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? In April this year the European Court of Human Rights declared the seven-year-imprisonment of the former Ukrainian president on a charge of abuse in office relating to gas deals with Russia “politically motivated.”
Wurth's production places her in a cell with a young woman who has been framed for murder. He explains how this device expounds the issues: “Having her sharing a cell in prison is fictitious, as in reality she is in solitary, so this was for dramatic purposes. The play focuses on the relationship between Yulia and her cellmate; two women from different worlds. One is 21, and comes from mud, from the villages, whereas Yulia is sophisticated – a politician. Yulia realises this is who she is fighting for; the whole purpose of the Orange Revolution of 2004 was democracy for people like this girl. It's in this way Yulia's politics and ideals come through. This young girl is very curious, and wants to know 'Who are you? How do you think?' It's not preaching at the audience, it's all done through the story of two women.”
Following the life, work and assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Badac Theatre Company's Anna focuses on those who report human rights failings, and are themselves persecuted as a result. Exploring Politkovskaya's exposure of abuses committed during the second Russian/Chechen war, the production features events she reported, and what she faced in doing so. The site-specific piece is performed in a corridor around a lift, recreating her shooting in the lift of her apartment block in 2006.
Writer and director Steve Lambert explains the significance of this aspect of the production: “[Anna] is attempting to drive home to the audience, by speaking directly to them, the fact that although human rights abuses are reported to them they don't really listen to, or act upon, the reports they get. The play is being performed in a corridor with the audience lined up against both walls and the action takes place between them. It is very intimate.”
Mark Bevan, Programme Director for Amnesty Scotland, believes the Fringe is the perfect forum in which to engage an audience thus: “Artists tend to know the value of freedom of expression more than most, and the Edinburgh Festival has always felt like a very natural place to talk about the right to say or laugh at whatever you wish without fear of reprisal. Last year we took to Edinburgh’s streets en masse as Pussy Riot. You simply couldn’t do the Edinburgh Fringe in Moscow.”
He cites the three productions as ideal contenders for the Freedom of Expression award, given to an outstanding Fringe production with a human rights message, saying: “All in all it sounds like another bumper year for productions with a human rights theme and I can’t wait to be in the audience.”
For Natalia Kaliada, the separation between audience, artists and subject matter is a barrier to be broken down: “The role of the arts and the media in combating human rights abuses is a vital one, but it's very important to keep it coming back to the fact that this is about human rights and we are humans. Artists often say it is our role to observe, not to participate, but that is not enough – to participate is our job as humans.”
