Speak No Evil @ The Merchant’s Hall
And so we must speak.
FULLfuse theatre presents an examination of freedom of self-expression through the eyes of a young asylum seeker who has fled Europe’s last dictatorship in Belarus.
Her parents were political activists, risking everything in the fight for liberty. They protested by whatever limited means available to them in a country where protest was not allowed – amongst the arrests, beatings and assassinations of contemporaries, some of them powerful. Twice she had to move home in the middle of the night in fear of a raid.
Her father now wonders whether he was correct to favour the noble plight over the securing of a peaceful life for his daughter. A conflict between the two of them over her decision to embrace agnosticism over her Protestant roots (which her grandfather was persecuted for) has the liberal hero in her life recast as the authoritarian, replacing the church and state of Belarus in her very own home. This perhaps marked the most compelling moment in a sometimes touching, sometimes rather well-trodden student-theatre presentation, decorated with occasional flashes of contemporary physical theatre and multimedia. “My story is full of clichés, but sometimes clichés come true," the script self-diagnoses a nonetheless enjoyable play.