Dogs of Europe, Barbican, review: an unnerving drama that foresaw the war in Ukraine
Does Dogs of Europe rank as the most topical theatre production of modern times? The now exiled Belarus Free Theatre – long-established dissidents under, and de facto enemies of, the Lukashenko regime – had hoped to bring their adaptation of a 2017 novel by Alhierd Bacharevic to the Barbican in 2020.
Covid intervened and the show arrived in London for four performances at the very moment its nightmare vision of a new world order, reshaped by Russian neo-imperialism, has erupted as a terrifying prospect in the heart of Europe.
The crisis is acutely felt by the company – everyone, apparently, has either friends or family in Ukraine and sadly musicians Mark and Marichka Marczyk have lost loved ones in the conflict. Unbearable. Of course, the situation in Ukraine is intensely volatile and perhaps the Friday night opening performance will be seen as having coincided with the high water mark of horror and dread.
But there’s little question now that Putin’s ambitions roughly accord with the totalitarian scheme in Bacharevic’s banned book. It’s set partly in 2049 – war between 2022 and 2025 has resulted in a rump of European democracies shielding behind a vast Cold War-style wall, with the dominion of the Russian ‘Reich’ stretching far east, in alliance with China. Given that we can barely see past next week now, it’s all conjecture, but what’s chilling is the prescience with which Bacharevic anticipated a war on Ukraine and the subsuming of Belarus.
All the same, those anticipating something straightforwardly intelligible, of a standard dystopian ilk, would have had their preconceptions swiftly dismantled. Co-directed by BFT founders Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, the production, running to a sprawling three hours, is a fever-dream of dark, surreal incident and discombobulating, detective-like quest.
Rather than showing us repression in blunt form, the impulse is allusive – a naked man pushing a heavy globe adorned with books across the stage in a repeated Sisyphean fashion; other books held, while brightly flaming; flung strips of red ribbon suggesting military onslaught. And there’s implied rape too, in a harrowing early scene in which a woman is manhandled on the ground.
The company’s forte is a physical fearlessness and that’s in ample evidence – Alexey Naranovich strips and runs in an exhausting circle for the duration of the interval. The troupe also love folkish ferocity, with outbreaks of wild dancing, keening song and a skittish buffoonery reminiscent of old-school absurdism.
The script, spoken in Belarusian, with English surtitles, whirls with a surfeit of whimsy and cryptic utterance, with projected collage-effect animations adding to a ‘through the looking glass’ ambience. “Belarus was hatched from an egg and chirping took flight over the forest”, is one description of a land so engulfed by its Russian overlord that it has become a faded, forbidden memory.
The gist is that an underlying thread of responsibility binds what seems disparate: a school-pupil called Mauchun helps a sinister major find a confused ‘holy fool’ called Kakouski, who gets killed; an odyssey-like investigation by a Berlin agent ensues across the bookshops of Europe. It’s a messy piece, sometimes almost a dog’s dinner, but its thrust is unignorable: the fate of freedom-loving people is interrelated, and all roads lead back to what has been happening in Belarus. If we don’t rise to the challenge, and urgently, the show’s over.
Until March 12. Tickets: barbican.org.uk
