Posts Tagged ‘gremina’
Magnitsky Play at Teatr.doc Hits Harder Than Ever
Some things remain relevant longer than you would expect.
Take the death of Sergei Magnitsky. This muck-raking attorney was allowed to die in a Moscow prison in November 2009. That story was still making news when Teatr.doc opened a show called “One Hour Eighteen” in the early summer of 2010. The show examined the actions of several people in close proximity to the prisoner when he mysteriously was allowed to die, apparently handcuffed, on a cold floor in a prison cell.
Teatr.doc has just reopened a second, renewed version of the play with several scenes added to respond to events of recent years. In fact, at the performance I attended last weekend there were lines drawn from that very day’s biggest news — the passing by the Russian Duma of the so-called “anti-Magnitsky” law. This measure banning Americans from adopting Russian children is widely seen as a response to the so-called Magnitsky Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Barack Obama two weeks ago. This act bans Russian officials suspected of being involved in the death of Magnitsky from traveling to the United States.
In short, unlike most stories entering the endless news cycle, the Magnitsky case is not going away. Mikhail Ugarov, who co-directed “One Hour Eighteen” with Talgat Batalov and who performs a scene in the new version, told me ruefully minutes before curtain time last week that he suspects a third version of the play is not far away.
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The Last Days of an Honest Man
In hour into “One Hour Eighteen Minutes,” a play recounting the death of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Moscow’s Sailor’s Silence prison, the woman seated next to me started to laugh. She was about 20, wearing a beret and an expensive blue coat.
Danny Scheinmann, an actor who at turns plays a journalist, a policeman and a medical orderly in Magnitsky’s story, was demonstrating how to find one’s pancreas, the source of much of Magnitsky’s pain. He lay on a tabletop, hitched up his shirt and pointed to a red outline sketching out the organ on his skin. The gesture released the tension in the audience. The woman laughed.
Scheinmann then impersonated the agony of Magnitsky as his diseased pancreas spewed out enzymes and digested his body from within while prison orderlies failed to help him. The laughter curdled in the woman’s throat.
The real Magnitsky was arrested in Moscow in 2008 while he was investigating a massive tax fraud committed against the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management. Russian Interior Ministry officials had been masterminding a scam under which they stole Hermitage documents and employed criminals to claim taxes the investment fund had already paid.
The same officials then arrested Magnitsky, accusing him of evading taxes himself. Held without trial for almost a year in increasingly squalid conditions, he died in detention, his illness untreated, in November 2009.
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From Russia with relevance
Sputnik Theatre Company specialises in bringing new Russian work to London. Next month it unravels the story of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in detention after suing Putin’s government, director Noah Birksted-Breen tells Oliver Poole.
Ask people their knowledge of Russian theatre and it is likely to begin and end with Anton Chekhov. A few may cite the works of Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov or even Alexander Ostrovsky — but knowledge of the contemporary scene is largely non-existent.
London director Noah Birksted-Breen hopes to help correct this omission with his debut of One Hour Eighteen Minutes, one of the most relevant of modern Russian plays, in London this month.
“People generally don’t know much about Russia here,” he says. “Hopefully those who come will know more than before. Ever since 2005, there has been a tremendous number of new plays and many of them, like this one, address what is happening now.”
One Hour Eighteen Minutes is certainly set in the contemporary Russia of Pussy Riot and crackdowns on opposition protesters familiar to London audiences from watching the evening news.
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Play marks death of lawyer who exposed Russian tax fraud
A play about the final moments of an anti-corruption lawyer who challenged Moscow in the biggest tax fraud in Russian history will be performed for the first time outside the country, marking the second anniversary of his death, the Moscow Times reported.
Sold out and playing for just one night at Amnesty International’s London headquarters on Wednesday, One Hour Eighteen exposes the killing of Sergie Magnitsky, after he testified against a group of corrupt Russian Ministry of Interior officers who he had investigated over the theft of millions of dollars.
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Second anniversary of Magnitsky death to be marked abroad
A series of events to mark the second anniversary of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death at a Moscow detention center, will be held in the United States and Europe, the Hermitage Capital’s press service has reported.
In memory of Sergei Magnitsky’s heroic resistance to corruption and bureaucratic tyranny, politicians, rights campaigners and cultural figures will hold a series of important events in the capitals of the United States, Britain and Germany, a Hermitage Capital spokesman told Interfax.
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London play honours lawyer who exposed Russian fraud
A play about the last moments of an anti-corruption lawyer who challenged Moscow will be performed for the first time outside Russia.
One Hour Eighteen details the killing of Sergei Magnitsky, who challenged the authorities over a £140 million racket. The father of two was working for investment fund Hermitage Capital when he uncovered the biggest tax fraud in Russian history and pointed the finger at senior officials, police and politicians. But he was accused of fraud himself, imprisoned without trial and tortured. In 2009, a group of men beat him to death in his cell.
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