Review: KS6: SMALL FORWARD, The Pit Barbican Centre

40 years ago this week, I spent a week in the Soviet Union. Moscow was many things - cold, grim, beautiful, fascinating - but what it definitely was not, was a black box underground club with a DJ and video screens That is what this corner of The Barbican Centre has become four days. 

That’s what Belarus Free Theatre has done to The Pit for KS6: Small Forward, not quite a play, not quite an illustrated lecture, more a rollercoaster of a multimedia event. But the shadow of that Russian Bear I first encountered in 1985 is cast deep in the City of London - much has changed, but much has not.

Katsiaryna Snytsina had other things to do in 1985 - being born, for example - but she grew up in Minsk, Belarus, under that shadow too. The daughter of two basketballers, she has been in a lifelong relationship with Mr Spalding (the reveal that this ‘man’ is a Spalding branded ball in a TV interview framing device is an early example of KS6’s winning wit) and, though recently retired, she still loves the game and can still move around the stage with feline grace.  

Her training was harsh, the Soviet-schooled coaches tough but not, in this telling, as ferocious - and worse - than those of the 80s in Romanian gymnastics or East German track and field. KS6 loved it too, the barbecues after practice, the mixing it with the boys in pick-up games on the street. It was an early awakening of her need to express herself. When the chance came to play professionally in France, at 17 she packed the one suitcase which was all she would ever use and began a peripatetic 20+ years on the road, playing for teams around Russia and Europe and also playing for the Belarus national team at The Olympics.

But this is not a play about sporting success. On their website, this production’s directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin make this statement. 

‘Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) is the only theatre in Europe banned by its government on political grounds. Founded in Minsk in 2005, BFT emerged as a direct challenge to the absolute censorship of freedom of artistic expression in “Europe’s Last Dictatorship”.’

For years, KS6 never bothered too much with the politics back home, but, in the wake of mass protests against the 2020 elections result, she transformed from sports star to activist, taking a stand against oppression, notwithstanding the torture meted out to colleagues of hers on the streets and behind the concrete walls of nameless buildings. She also came out as a lesbian, another challenge to an overtly homophobic state. As her powers on-court slowed with age, off-court they accelerated, fired by anger, confidence and the love of a wife.

Her story is told not just in words, but in music (DJ, Blanka Barbara provides a joyous energy on the decks) and video, some clips of matches, some more personal, some truly horrific. But we’re won over by KS6 herself, funny, clever, committed and finally at ease in her own skin, fighting not just for her team, but for all Belarusians, at home, or like her and the BFT, in exile. 

The show might not tell us much that’s new about authoritarian states - there is a predictable banality about their evil that can be numbing - but such is KS6’s gift in connecting with her audience and BFT’s marshalling of theatre’s opportunities for storytelling, that you feel the rumble of anger in your soul.

In a postscript, KS6 requests that we write to a political prisoner to tell them, with the world’s eyes on Gaza and Ukraine, that they are not forgotten. Thanks to the bravery of Katsiaryna, Natalia, Nicolai and thousands more like them, they are not.

KS6: Small Forward at The Pit, Barbican Centre until 8 February

Photo images: Nicolai Khalezin

 

    

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