Posts Tagged ‘one hour eighteen minutes’
Play puts Russian justice system in dock over lawyer’s death
In a poorly lit basement theatre in central Moscow, actors play out a symbolic trial of Russia’s justice system over its failure to protect an anti-corruption lawyer who died in custody.
Without costumes or a set, the actors in “One Hour and Eighteen Minutes” take on the roles of judges, an investigator, doctor and medical assistants, reciting lines cobbled together from legal documents, media and public pronouncements on the case of Sergei Magnitsky.
His death in 2009, while awaiting trial on charges of tax evasion and fraud, has outraged human rights campaigners who see it as an example of arbitrary justice in Russia, and contributed to a rift in U.S.-Russian relations.
A nervous giggle runs through the audience, perched on wooden chairs and benches, when an actor playing a judge says that the justice system is the only thing that is still working in Russia.
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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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REVIEW: One Hour Eighteen Minutes at New Diorama Theatre by Theodora Clarke
It takes a brave playwright in Russia to tackle Government corruption there today. However, that is exactly what Elena Gremina does in ‘One Hour Eighteen Minutes’. Her play is a political work that draws on the real life story of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who accused Russian Interior Ministry officials of embezzling 230 million dollars in the form of a fraudulent tax refund. Shortly afterwards, Magnitsky was arrested and held without trial for nearly a year. Two weeks before he would have had to be released, he was found dead in custody during a transfer to another prison. The title of the play refers to the period of time that medical treatment was denied to him in his cell. The assumption here is that Magnitsky died as a result of medical neglect and abuse in prison.
The play is inspired by a range of materials including first hand interviews with whistleblowers. Gremina’s text asserts that Magnitsky was denied access to clean drinking water and shared a cell with seventy prisoners surrounded by open sewage and rats. The play suggests it is most likely he developed pancreatitis brought on by these squalid conditions. Gremina pulls no punches in her presentation of the story. She presents the viewpoint that he was murdered and that the Government then proceeded to cover up the truth.
The theme of Government corruption looms large in the production. The performance by Wendy Nottingham of Judge Elena Stashnikova is both convincing and terrifying. She is interviewed about her decision to refuse Magnitsky medical treatment in prison. In one telling moment she says:
“No. I’m not a person. Judges are not “people” in the legal process. We’re there to reflect the will of the government.
I’ve had cases where there’s been nowhere near enough evidence against the accused – but I managed to get a guilty verdict in the end. That’s my job. If you’re in court and the judge says black is white and white is black, then that’s how it has to be.”
Interestingly, when the play first opened in November 2010 at theatre.doc in Moscow it did not include several of the interviews in the current version. Following the premiere, a number of people who knew the characters in the play, approached Gremina with additional testimony. This was a year after Magnitsky’s death. As a result, new interviews have been included in the updated version of the play.
All of the characters in the play are real and where possible words are taken from interviews and court hearings conducted between 2008 and 2012. Their names are flashed up on projections above the stage so that the audience is aware which scenes are reconstructions and which are based on real transcripts.
While the subject matter is gripping it sometimes it is hard to follow the action. There are only four actors, who play several parts in the production, so it is not always clear who is speaking. Then there is the question of context, as this play was written for a specific audience in Moscow. There are a number of aspects of the play which are lost in translation. For example, it makes assumptions about the knowledge of a British audience who will be less well-acquainted with Magnitsky’s case. Also it is hard to shrink such huge subject matter into only sixty minutes and so the story feels somewhat condensed.
However, despite these minor shortcomings, this is a disturbing and gripping play. The setting of an office filled with books and files is used to full claustrophobic effect such as, when Magnitsky’s wife embarks on a Kafkaesque search for her missing husband. She uses various windows to speak to prison guards which open in the bookshelves. The director Noah Birkted-Breen also makes effective use of video cameras to interview characters and project them onto transparent screens above the stage.
Sputnik Theatre, which brought the play over to London, provide an important service to the public in sourcing, translating and presenting contemporary Russian drama in the UK. ‘One Hour Eighteen Minutes’ works well as an introduction to Russian political theatre. For audiences looking for a good fringe or off-West End production to see then they could do no better than to start here.
One Hour Eighteen Minutes
New Diorama Theatre
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Celebrities, dissidents pay tribute to Magnitsky
On Tuesday night, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, activist Bianca Jagger and legendary dissident Vladimir Bukowski joined Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder in paying tribute to Sergei Magnitsky, the anti-corruption attorney killed in prison three years ago.
The panel gathered to attend a performance of the play “One Hour Eighteen Minutes,” which recounts the final moments of Sergei’s life, after being beaten and left to die in a cell in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. The title of the play refers to the time that prison guards prevented civilian medics from entering his cell to register his death. Written by Russian playwright Elena Gremina, this new production is directed by Noah Birksted-Breen, winner of the Channel 4 Theatre Director’s Award in 2006.
The performance was scheduled to commemorate the three-year anniversary of Sergei’s death on the 16th of November. The anniversary itself saw the passage of the historic Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act in the US House of Representatives. The bill, which would impose sanctions on the individuals implicated in Magnitsky’s imprisonment and death, as well as other Russian individuals credibly suspected of human rights abuses, is expected to pass in the Senate and be signed into law by President Obama before the end of the year.
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Anti-Corruption Views – One Hour Eighteen Minutes – a review
One hour, eighteen minutes is the amount of time that remains unaccounted for between a doctor being called to treat Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison and the time Magnitsky, a lawyer, was pronounced dead. It is also the name of a new play by Elena Gremina – a play that portrays accounts, from his supporters and from his own diary entries, of events in the year leading up to his death. The play uses as background official reports that were either public or dug up by supporters.
Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year old father of two, died just under a year after being held on tax evasion and fraud charges. Former colleagues say the charges were fabricated by police investigators he had accused of stealing $230 million from the Russian state through fraudulent tax refunds.
While Magnitsky’s death was officially attributed to an undetected illness, the Kremlin’s own human rights council has said he was probably beaten to death.
His story has gained international prominence due to the campaigning efforts of his friends, family and former colleagues.
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One Hour Eighteen Minutes, New Diorama, review
In the UK, we’re familiar with the name of Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist and outspoken critic of the Putin regime gunned down outside her flat in Moscow in 2006.
Despite much thorough and expert reporting by the Telegraph’s economics editor Philip Aldrick, I suspect readers may be far less aware of the perturbing case of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in November 2009 at the age of 37 as a consequence of appalling neglect – and probably abuse – by the authorities. He had been detained in increasingly squalid conditions for 358 days without trial.
Held on charges of tax evasion, his offence appears to have been that he uncovered a huge trail of fraud and corruption while working for the UK-based hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management – centring on the criminal hijacking of sundry legitimate Hermitage companies in order to reclaim $230m in tax from the Russian state.
Partly because this embezzlement was a complex business, Magnitsky – who is currently being tried posthumously, in a new low for Russian law – is not an easy name to conjure with but he has still become a cause celebre in the West and quite possibly a catalyst for significant change.
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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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One Hour Eighteen Minutes – a play about Sergei Magnitsky at the Sputnik Theatre
Sputnik Theatre
16th of November 2012 – a significant date…
Dear friends,
Russia is rarely out of the news these days with the ongoing protests and the sentencing of Pussy Riot. But one story which is just as intriguing and Kafka-esque is the life and death of Sergei Magnitsky.
The 16th of November 2012 will be the third anniversary of Sergei Magnitsky’s death in police custody.
This year, Elena Gremina – one of Russia’s most important political playwrights, recently commissioned by the Tricycle Theatre as part of ‘The Bomb’ – has updated her play, One Hour Eighteen Minutes, to include the very latest developments of this story about Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower against government corruption. Gremina’s play is based on original, first-hand interviews.
The updated version of the play is being launched at Teatr.doc in Moscow at exactly the same time as Sputnik’s London production.
We’re delighted to welcome such a strong cast and creative team to Sputnik’s forthcoming show. You can read more about them below… We hope to see you there!
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Russian play about judicial corruption comes to the Capitol
The City of Baltimore has recently found itself under the harsh gaze of the Russia Today: in a 500 word piece, shaped by an hour or so of immersion in Baltimore’s one-block red zone, and many hours evidently spent watching “The Wire,” a Russian reporter dutifully described Baltimore as a war zone of economic imbalance. A few days later, Russia Today parroted a Baltimore Sun piece describing Baltimore’s homeless problem.
Now, with a production of One Hour Eighteen Minutes, it looks like Baltimore is ready to return the favor with a ruthless theatrical investigation of Russian judicial corruption.
On November 16, One Hour Eighteen Minutes, directed by Baltimore based Russian director Yury Urnov and supported by the Baltimore-based Center for International Theatre Development, is going to play at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington DC.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky