Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, is generous with his brutality, locking up dissidents, authorising torture and making it dangerous for many of its citizens to live inside the country. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, whom many people believe to have won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, has had to seek sanctuary in Lithuania to avoid imprisonment.
Even theatre companies and sportspeople have had to flee the country and continue their struggle for freedom in Belarus from beyond its borders.
That 2020 election became a wake-up call to the basketball player Katsiaryna Snytsina, known as Katya, who, having made it known she objected to the dictator, escaped punishment by leaving for London where she joined the London Lions basketball team. If being a dissident wasn’t enough to earn her the disapproval of the regime in Belarus, she came out as a lesbian, earning herself the label of “extremist lesbian”.
Teaming up with the Belarus Free Theatre, Katya tells her story in KS6: Small Forward, which takes its title from the initials of her name and team position. The pulsating rhythms of the music played by DJ Blanka Barbara greet us as we enter the Barbican Pit. One of the crew gives each of us a picture of a Belarus political prisoner. Later, we will be asked to write a letter to them to show they are not alone and forgotten.
There is a conversational style to the production, which opens with an interview that morphs into Katya speaking directly to us throughout the performance, taking us from her early years with two parents who were basketball players and a cruel coach whose harsh training style summed up a political system that humiliated the individual, telling them, “you are worth nothing.”
Images of police beating up protesters are projected onto the back of the stage for much of the performance, though there are gentler moments. At one point, two characters with a video camera recreate the sporting arena gimmick of the kiss cam searching out a couple from the audience to project onto the screen.
Other moments of audience participation include a competition between volunteers chucking balls into a hanging net while the rest of us counted the score.
The Belarus Free Theatre contributes several visually striking elements. We meet her parents, whose heads are basketballs, and the character Billy Ball’s huge basketball head wears an expression of manic mischief. As Katya tells an early part of her story, two figures in cartoonish Soviet Youth uniforms robotically walk onto the stage and blow raucously into trumpets for a few seconds before mechanically marching off.
The most disturbing sequence stands as a metaphor for the time when Katya’s partner Nadya was placed with 36 others in a cell built for four. Katya is locked in a narrow glass container as two trolleys of basketballs are used to bury her.
However, all the games, cartoon figures and great dance music add very little if anything to the central thread of Katya’s story, even if they are entertaining. They are slightly distracting from our experience of the way the complacent innocent bubble of Katya’s life changed with her recognition that it was possible for women to love each other, this taking place alongside her growing awareness of an unjust society following the political shock of the 2020 coup by dictator Lukashenko.
Katya shares special moments in her life, such as the reaction of her parents to her coming out as a lesbian. It’s easy to join her in smiling as she describes that sequence. But mostly, it feels as if we are skimming the surface of things, never going into any depth and importantly because this is a theatrical event failing to seek out the thematic dramatic tension that can keep us on the edge of our seats.