Teatr Polski. They Saw Dreams… (Photo)

Nikolay Khalezin puts on the stage a play about Belarusian women in Polish Theatre.

The protagonists of the play are the wife of the presidential candidate in Belarus, a journalist of Novaya Gazeta Iryna Khalip, the editor-in-chief of charter97.org website Natallya Radzina, Andrei Sannikov’s sister Iryna Bahdanava, the widow of the businessman abducted in Belarus, Iryna Krasouskaya, the daughter of a political prisoner Zmitser Bandarenka, Yuliya Bandarenka, the director of Free Theatre Natalya Kolyada.

In his blog the manager of Belarus Free Theatre has opened the veil of secrecy a little and told about the play which is being produced by him in the Polish Theatre in Warsaw.

“The idea of the play appeared after Andrzej Severin arrived from Paris to a meeting with us to Lyon where we were teaching then. His whirlwind appearance, for just a few hours to hold talks, looked a little strange. At that moment, in February 2010, Severin was an actor of Comédie Française, and it was obvious that he was not going to discuss staging Molière on the grand stage of this theatre-museum. Besides, his merits created a certain distance – he is a Knight of the Legion of Honour; the favourite actor of Andrzej Wajda, “the sanctity” of Comédie Française.

But we met a very open, emotional man, who broke all the barriers of conventionalities (within three minutes. He told us that since September his annual leave starts (actors of Comédie Française have a right for a one-year leave with pay once in ten years), and signs a contract with Warsaw’s Teatr Polski, which had been in a deep crisis for several dozens of years. Andrzej offered us to put a play on the stage of that theatre, with the actors who would become a part of the renewed company. Initially the play Jeans Generation was meant, however very soon we changed the project and decided to combine two texts on the stage – Jeans Generation and the play by Natalia Kolyada They Saw Dreams which tells about the wives of abducted and murdered Belarusian politicians and public figures. Notably, we planned to create a play in two acts, in which Jeans Generation was to be produced by me, and Dreams… by Vladimir Shcherban.

Having given the positive answer in principle, we did not expect that this project would be postponed for two years, when the events would take place in our country, which would make us settle down in the Great Britain. All the collisions, accommodations and two auditions were over, and on March 28 I held the first rehearsal. But a serious transformation of the project preceded that. Firstly, Vladimir could not take part in this project, as he has rehearsals of two plays in the Great Britain at the same time, King Lear, which is to at the Shakespeare’s theater, the Globe on May 17 and 18, and finishes the work on Minsk-2011, which is being prepared for a great tour over Britain, and a performance at Young Vic stage.

We had to revise the plays too. But while jeans Generation was just abridged by me, They Saw Dreams demanded not even radical changes, but a new text to be written. The reason is simple, the first variant of the text told about the events happening ten years ago, and we wanted to return the play into the modern times, and to discuss the stories and dramas which are happening in Belarus recently, after December 19, 2011. Being under time pressure, we had to do lots of work. Natalia held about 40 interviews, collected a great number of material, I polished the text, abridged and edited the final version. We decided to abandon the two-act structure, and let the scenes cross over. Finally, our timeless translator Agneszka had to translate just-in-time, and I started rehearsals without having the final version of the text. However, it was for the good, we could hold the first three rehearsals forming the material together with actors, and dipping them into Belarusian reality. They came through the first rehearsal with honour, though it was an incredible intensive work: actors of the Belarus Free theatre are ready for that, but actors of theatres with high status, like Teatr Polski, often not.

I would not go into much professional detail, but in the end I would like to tell about the casting. It could be told now, as the cast has been approved, they work and I hope there would be no changes. The top line is the name of an actor, and bottom line is the character played by him or her.

The first night of the play is scheduled for June 9.”