Carrie Cracknell, Nina Raine and Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin share memories of working with the playwright and ‘guardian angel’
Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, co-founding artistic directors of Belarus Free Theatre
In 2005, we wrote to Tom Stoppard from inside the tightening grip of what has been described as the last dictatorship in Europe. We were building a theatre that wasn’t meant to exist in Belarus. Tom replied almost instantly: “You can count on my support. But what else can I do for you?” Our request was both audacious and simple: we asked him to come to Belarus.
He agreed, asking only for some time to finish the final edit of Rock’n’Roll. When he arrived, he didn’t give the classes we had asked for. Instead he listened, he asked questions. We took him to meet the whole underground resistance movement: artists, underground theatre-makers, the wives of friends who had been kidnapped and murdered, political prisoners, youth activists, journalists and human rights defenders. Sitting with us in the “London” bar in Minsk, he said something that captured everything we felt but had not yet found the words for: “A dictatorship is not a political category, it is a moral one.”
