Published in The List
EVERY YEAR, Amnesty International gives an award to a play on the
Fringe that presses the right artistic buttons and spreads the word
about human rights. When the judges come to consider this year’s Freedom
of Expression Award, two shows in particular will leap to their
attention. Both of them focus on recent examples of political abuse
against prominent women in Eastern Europe.
At Assembly Roxy, Ines Wurth is presenting Who Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko?,
a two-hander about the former Ukrainian prime minister imprisoned for
an alleged abuse of office. Over at Summerhall, Badac Theatre Company’s Anna dramatises the case of Anna Politkovskaya,
the campaigning journalist who was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow
apartment in 2006: an unsolved murder featuring all the hallmarks of a
contract killing.
With her long braided blonde hair, Yulia Tymoshenko does not fit the typical image of a political prisoner. This leader of 2004’s Orange Revolution
is both uncommonly beautiful and, being president of a major Ukrainian
gas company, uncommonly rich. Neither of those details justifies the
indefinite pre-trial detention in 2011 which the European Court of Human
Rights recently called ‘arbitrary and unlawful’. The court is still
considering whether the Ukraine authorities were right to prosecute her
for signing a ten-year contract for the supply of Russian gas, allegedly
without proper cabinet approval.
It is true that opinion is
divided over Tymoshenko. Some think she is a profiteering businesswoman
who brought her country to its knees for her own financial gain. Others
see her as a victim of a vengeful political adversary in the form of the
president Viktor Yanukovych.
Either side, of course, could be right. ‘The big issue is that nobody
really knows yet,’ says Ines Wurth, who portrays Tymoshenko.
The
point made forcibly by Tymoshenko’s supporters, however, is that her
imprisonment is politically motivated. In 2011, Amnesty’s John Dalhuisen
said: ‘The charges against her are not internationally recognisable
offences, they are attempts to criminalise decisions that she made in
the course of her work. Poor political decisions of this kind – if that
is what they were – should be punished by voters, not through courts.’
Having
watched footage, Wurth believes the hearing was ‘extremely
manipulated’. In a hot and overcrowded courtroom, the prosecution
appeared to make things unreasonably difficult for Tymoshenko’s defence
attorney. ‘He was supposed to read a 500-page document and prepare for
the court hearing in two days,’ she says. ‘Yulia wasn’t allowed to be in
the hearing, which is also something you don’t do.’
Who Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? grew from a documentary made by director Jakov Sedlar
before Tymoshenko was imprisoned. A US-Croatian co-production, the play
imagines the politician not in solitary confinement but finding common
ground with a fictional cellmate imprisoned for prostitution. Rather
than take sides about the Tymoshenko case, Hrvoje Hitrec’s new play
raises questions about human rights, particularly the treatment of
women.
‘These kind of mafia cronies came from the Communist
regime and it’s just a big boys’ club,’ says Wurth who grew up in
Croatia and has witnessed male chauvinism first hand. ‘She’s a very
attractive woman who’s very refined; she’s not a peasant. That’s why
she’s really fascinating.’
Giving the play its world premiere at
the Fringe is a way of reminding audiences how close to home all this
is. ‘How can it be in the 21st century that people can treat each other
this way and within Europe?’ Wurth says. ‘People talk about “Eastern
Europe”, but Ukraine is a developed European country and this sort of
stuff should not be happening.’
Badac’s
Steve Lambert has similar ambitions by raising awareness of the
murdered Anna Politkovskaya and campaigning reporters like her. It may
be unfashionable to stick up for journalists in this post-Leveson era,
but Lambert is full of praise for the job so many of them do. ‘What
Politkovskaya did was just incredible,’ he says. ‘She went backwards and
forwards to Chechnya, knowing all the dangers, but thinking these
people needed to be helped and their stories needed to be told. There
are some things that happen in the world that we must be informed about
and these people put themselves in positions of great danger. There are
journalists all over the world who every day are doing this sort of
thing; and really, do we listen to them?’
His company, which caused a major stir at the 2008 Fringe with uncompromising Holocaust drama The Factory,
is committed to exploring what ‘human rights abuses mean to the
individual’. For the audience, that means not just watching but taking
action. ‘Politkovskaya was angry that, although the stories of Chechnya
and Russia were there, people weren’t doing anything,’ says Lambert, who
has met the journalist’s sister and colleagues. ‘It’s not just about
someone putting themselves in danger, there’s a responsibility on behalf
of the public to listen and do something.’
As a human rights
campaigner, the US-born Politkovskaya was a vocal opponent of Russia’s
invasion of Chechnya in 1999 and a stern critic of Vladimir Putin.
Brought up in Russia, she wrote books and articles that highlighted
what she saw as ‘the death of Russian parliamentary democracy’. Having
been subject to repeated death threats and surviving an apparent
poisoning attempt, she was shot four times by an unknown assailant.
Playing
Politkovskaya is the Shetland-born Marnie Baxter, who cut her teeth at
Edinburgh’s Theatre Workshop. She has been closely involved in the
script development and takes seriously the responsibility of portraying
such a sensitive true-life case. ‘The more I read about her, the more in
awe I am of her,’ Baxter says. ‘She was killed because she was so
determined to tell the truth and determined beyond all reason to carry
on with her work. She wouldn’t calm down and she wouldn’t back off and
that’s why she’s not with us now.’
Anna, Summerhall, 0845 874 3001, 2–25 Aug (not 12), 8.30pm, £10 (£8);
Who
Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko?, Assembly Roxy, Roxburgh Place, 0131
623 3030, 3–25 Aug, 11am, £10–£12 (£8–£10). Previews 1 & 2 Aug, £8.
© Mark Fisher, 1997 and 2013
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