Belarus Free Theatre Announces The Next Kitchen Revolution Supper Club, Featuring Masha Gessen

On Tuesday 16 January, Belarus Free Theatre will host the next Kitchen Revolution supper club, featuring celebrated Russian-American journalist and leading LGBT activist Masha Gessen. The evening will be chaired by Hazel Healey, editor at the New Internationalist magazine, and will also feature Occupy activist and news commentator Jamie Kelsey-Fry.

Kitchen Revolution is a series of evenings that combine supper and secrecy, all served with a dash of sedition. Guests will enjoy a feast of home-cooked Soviet food and wine served in a private house, including a selection of special Belarusian dishes to celebrate Old New Year, such as 'herring in a fur coat', a traditional layered salad made of finely chopped pickled herring, eggs, beetroot, carrots and potatoes.

The theme of this evening is 'The uncertain future of democracy'. Provocateurs Masha and Jamie will lead guests in conversations about this increasingly beleaguered form of government, as we look back on a year dominated by Trump, Putin and Brexit, and forward to an uncertain future.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author who won the 2017 National Book Award, the highest literary honour in the United States, for the book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. She is also the author of the 2012 international bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and several other books. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor at Amherst College. Gessen lives in New York City

In the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents and intellectuals would gather in each other's homes to talk, argue and dream about one thing - freedom. These whispered conversations, which would have been deemed treasonous if held in public, ultimately coalesced into actions that helped overthrow the repressive Soviet system. This was nicknamed the 'kitchen revolution'.

Decades later and a world away, Britain's hard-won freedoms are being eroded, as too many of us sink into political apathy, and a stultifying conservatism envelops the creative arts. It's time for a new and more public kitchen revolution, time to turn up the volume on the kitchen table whispers of the past, and to encourage everyone to consider how artists should respond when democracy comes under threat.

Natalia Kaliada said: "I spent my childhood under the Soviet regime, and I still remember my parents' kitchen reverberating with the fierce whispers of dissent. Even when everything is suppressed, it is very difficult to crush that human desire to keep talking, to keep challenging lies, defending truth, and hoping for change. With Kitchen Revolution, we want to remind people how precious and important the freedom to speak really is, and to look at how we might start translating words into real action."

Belarus Free Theatre is one of the foremost refugee-led theatre companies in the UK and the only theatre in Europe banned by its government on political grounds. In April, the company was forced to postpone the premiere of a new show in Minsk, after several of its members were arrested or injured during crackdowns on democratic protests against Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko.

Price: £25 per head, including a feast of Soviet food and complimentary wine.

Booking: belarusfreetheatre.ritdns.co.uk/kitchenrevolution

Belarus Free Theatre is an award-winning theatre company founded in 2005 in Minsk under Europe's last surviving dictatorship. Its existence is illegal in a country where only state-sanctioned theatre is permitted. Since 2011, founding members, husband and wife team Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, together with Associate Director Vladimir Shcherban, have been political refugees in the UK; the company therefore now operates between Minsk and London.

BFT's permanent ensemble is based in Minsk, where they campaign, educate and perform every single day of the year, underground. Performers and audiences are under constant surveillance by the authorities. Performances have been raided by the KGB and audience members arrested. In spite of this, BFT is a hot ticket, delivering sold-out performances over 100 times per year in its 60-seat venue.

Described by The New York Times as, "one of the bravest and most inspired underground troupes on the planet", BFT has brought audiences some of the world's most provocative theatre, and has performed over 40 new productions in more than 30 countries over the past decade.

Belarus Free Theatre has enjoyed the support and solidarity of fellow artists including the late Harold Pinter and Vaclav Havel; Sir Tom Stoppard, David Lan, Steven Spielberg, Jude Law, Kevin Spacey, Mick Jagger, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Joanna Lumley, Vivienne Westwood, Kim Cattrall, Ian McKellen and Samuel West. Belarus Free Theatre is an Associate Company of The Young Vic and of the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. BFT also has long-standing partnerships with both The Public Theater and LaMaMa in New York.

BFT's most recent theatre production was Burning Doors - which played at the Soho Theatre in London, toured the UK in 2016, and recently completed a tour of the United States. In Burning Doors, BFT combined forces with Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina to share stories of persecuted artists, living under dictatorship, who refuse to be silenced. The production was awarded 'Best Ensemble' at the 2016 Offie Awards.

In 2015, the BFT celebrated their tenth anniversary with a two-week festival of performances and discussions in London, entitled Staging a Revolution, featuring some of their most acclaimed original productions, reinvigorated classics and brand new work. Staging a Revolution put ten taboo ideas - including mental health, torture, sex and inequality - centre stage in an effort to inspire and invigorate UK audiences to see themselves as change-makers.

Following each performance, a curated panel of experts, including artists, campaigners, journalists and activists discussed an area related to each taboo topic in order to generate fresh ideas for taking action. This approach (similar to the one that will be taken in Kitchen Revolution) is drawn directly from BFT's work in Minsk, where the space for free exchange of ideas and open debate is as valuable as the space in which to see independent theatre.

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