One thing that Dennis Kelly doesn’t appear to consider is that sometimes the very act of making theatre is judged to be political. In May I wrote about Belarus Free Theatre and it’s co-founder, Natalia Kaliada. Yesterday my friend Paula, blogged the latest from them:

When I interviewed you last year, you’d been forced to leave Belarus and were living with your husband [the playwright Nikolai Khalezin] and your daughter in exile in Britain. Your friends were in prison, some had been tortured, your family had been threatened. Has anything improved?

An extract from an interview with Natalia Kaliad

‘In Belarus it’s very simple – everything’s repressed’

Natalia Kaliada talks more here about the company’s new play and the escalating brutality in her homeland

A very different kind of political theatre to that of DV8. One that exists because of political oppression and is oppressed as a result.  Brave artists who keep creating theatre in the hope that it will bring about change or at the very least, let a wider world understand what needs to be changed – another quest for truth – but this time a more bloody and deadly one.