After Dubrovka

A theatre installation by Neil Mackenzie and Mole Wetherell
(Reckless Sleepers Performance Company,
with sound artist Spencer Marsden.
A Nuffield Theatre out of the box production performed at and in association with the Lancaster Grand.
11 - 13 October 2007

Reviewed by Jane Sunderland

“The theatre will be taken over. It will be wired with speakers, on the stage and in the auditorium. You will be able to stand on the stage and sit in the auditorium, and move between the two. From each speaker you will hear a different voice, the voice of someone not there, talking about being not there, and what it means for you to be there, in their place.”

For those who don’t remember (most of us, I imagine), ‘Dubrovka’ was the location of a particular theatre in Moscow. While the musical Nord Ost was being performed there in October 2002, to a full house, audience and performers became hostages to Chechen rebels (including many women) who had taken over the theatre. After two and a half days, the Russian military pumped in a sedative gas and stormed the building. 129 members of the audience and performers died.

So, After Dubrovka is site-specific theatre with a difference. It is literally set in a theatre, about a theatre, and uses the auditorium as well as the stage, but there is no ‘performance’ as such. To start with there is you, and your companions, on the stage – and a small audience. You hear hypnotic, whispering voices from speakers above your head, making you think about being where you are, and the power you have. You can move round on the stage as different speakers activate.

It is suggested to you that the audience is comfortable, settled, immobile, in your hands. You are made to feel that you could do what you wanted - which is at the same time what is right - and they wouldn’t be too surprised. You could do things you wouldn’t normally do. After all, the theatre, draped in its black curtains, is another space.

Each ‘performer’ then becomes a member of the audience, sitting at a distance from other members of the audience, watching people on the stage doing what you have just been doing, allowing you to see what you looked like doing it. But you are still under a spotlight.

This event makes explicit the link between performance in the theatre and performance in our everyday lives. After Dubrovka is not a reconstruction of the siege and the loss of life that followed; indeed, there is no mention of the siege. Rather, as the A4 sheet provided tells us, it “starts from the memory of this event, and from some of the questions it raises”.

It challenges the comfortable binary of actors/audience “where every detail on the stage is played for a reason”. During the siege, Nord Ost was too-dramatically interrupted, the ‘fourth wall’ disappeared, the actors and the audience were both at the mercy of events, and no-one knew how the subsequent ‘performance’ they were to witness would end. The new ‘actors’ had their own scripts, but so did the newly constituted ‘audience’: in their roles as watched hostages, many of whom, we can imagine, would have been afraid to move.

After Dubrovka thus challenges our expectations about what it means to ‘go to the theatre’ (today, and in October five years ago), and about what After Dubrovka is likely to be ‘about’. It provides a genuine experience of what theatre can be, if audiences will allow it. Perhaps more importantly, the brief psychological discomfort and/or insight it affords brings us that bit closer to all who were part of the Dubrovka tragedy of just five years ago. Go if you can.

Grand Theatre, St Leonardgate, Lancaster, LA1 1NL
Box Office: 01524 64695

Tickets: £5 / £3 concessions

Links

After Dubrovka

wikipedia: Moscow theater hostage crisis

© Jane Sunderland 12/10/07