Being Harold Pinter

Goodman Theater, Chicago

(312) 443-3800

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It’s not often that Americans see actors perform who are risking their freedom just by stepping onto the stage, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Such courage will be on display for the next four weeks in Chicago, though, as the members of the Belarus Free Theater bring this “critically acclaimed” work of political theater to three venues that have bonded together to offer them temporary asylum. Belarus, considered to be “the last remaining true dictatorship in Europe,” prohibits non-state-run theater groups, and two of this company’s members were imprisoned shortly after a national election in December. New York’s Public Theater helped arrange the other members’ escape, then featured Being Harold Pinter recently at its Under the Radar festival. To buy the actors more time to decide their next move, the Chicago art community patched together its “remarkable” invitation virtually overnight.

The play itself is “a work of harrowing intensity and commitment,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Created by company member Vladimir Shcherban, it combines scenes from the late English playwright’s dramas with actual testimony from Belarus’ imprisoned political dissidents. Somehow, Shcherban’s dramatic collage “finds a compelling continuity” while making clear that the beleaguered existences it depicts “aren’t so different from the lives of the performers.” Here in America—where the only stage show “regularly making headlines” is a big-budget musical about Spider-Man—viewers will feel chastened.

There are times, though, when “the offstage story is more gripping than the onstage one,” said David Sheward in Backstage. Being Harold Pinter is performed entirely in Russian, with English subtitles “projected on a screen” in back. That, plus the overbearing violence of the torture scenes, tends to diminish the content’s resonance. Still, seeing the “dedication and courage” of the actors makes such considerations seem petty. Many a critic has picked apart the scenes of a Pinter play. Here, his works are fused into an “objective re-creation of a terrifying reality.”