Burning Doors: an impassioned cry to action
22 Jun 2018

The Luminato Festival is bookended by two powerful performances advocating artistic resistance. If RIOT was a riotous mishmash of artistic disciplines using subversive humour and glitter to make its point, Burning Doors is a relentless punch to the gut. The Belarus Free Theatre also mixes and matches artistic forms with great skill, but their goal is not to entertain but to galvanize. 

Burning Doors is based on the experiences of political prisoners Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, actionist artist Petr Pavlensky, and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov. Their stories are harrowing, as are the re-enactments, even when heavily theatricalized and presented through theatre, dance and circus metaphors. The opening, after being subjected to a relentless unnerving drone while surtitles give brief biographical sketches of the three artists/activists, illustrates the horrors Alyokhina lived through with graphic and shocking depictions of the strip searches and interrogations she was subjected to. 

From there Burning Doors moves into an almost vaudevillian dialogue between two Russian bureaucrats simultaneously debating the virtues of purchasing a yacht or British real estate, while trying to figure out what to do with these prisoners. It is humour of the blackest pitch and deeply disturbing. As Burning Doors continues, it slowly focuses on the dangers of complicity, a pointed indictment of how humanity is stripped away by politics and greed. All the threads come together in a long dance piece that is brutally rendered before the audience, stunned to silence by the finale, is asked to participate in a filmed action.

There are passages that are brilliant, an extraordinary fusion of theatre and cri de coeur, but there are also sections that fall slack with excursions into philosophy, literature and a question and answer interlude. The balance keeps unbalancing and the anger, understandably, overwhelms the theatre. Maybe this isn't the time for subtlety or risking misinterpretation, but being viewed in the midst of the US's incarceration of refugee children - and children are a recurring motif throughout Burning Doors - the point was scathingly obvious and, probably by necessity, heavy-handed.

All of the performances are committed, soulful and physically taxing. There is a fascinating disconnect with the Russian language and the surtitles that amplifies the passion of the performances, these are voices raised in anger, fear and desire for change, but they are also rich and fill the theatre with sound that resonates. There are warnings at the entrance and all the advertising that there are scenes of torture and nudity. There most certainly are and the cast is fearless, flinging themselves into the demands of the roles and baring themselves down to the core of their souls. It is a horrifying inversion of the circus demonstration of transcending the limits of the human body: Burning Doors is a demonstration of how the limits of the human body, and soul, can be broken.  These beautiful bodies, actors in peak physical condition, being brutalized is painful to watch with a disturbing erotic component that accentuates the discomfort.

This is theatre that matters and the Belarus Free Theatre - whose history should be read to add context - achieves its aims while also exploring just how to tell a story that is so terrible that it shouldn't exist. It is a cry to arms, agit-prop theatre, and as such works extremely well. When the cast stands at the end, defiant and strong if shattered, on a stage still literally aflame and awash with sweat, urine and tears, it is moving, shocking and our complicity is exposed, leaving more questions than answers. And a desire to stand up, to be moved to activism.