\u201cI love complicated stories. My role model is Chekhov. His characters are also incredibly multi-layered.\u201d Director and writer Evgeniya Rudyuk was responding to comments from the audience during the post-performance discussion following \u201cQueer Quark\u201d at CC Amstel. The mission was a success. Her nameless protagonist, played by Natalia Perel, tells a story, part of which she then denies at the end. This leaves the audience in a state of confusion. Very Russian, it turns out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The title of this performance, *Queer Quark*, does not necessarily refer to the \u2018queerness\u2019 expressed during Pride events, but it does draw on it. According to the writer, her \u2018queer quark\u2019 is a ghost particle from quantum physics, elusive and not fitting into the Standard Model. So that was also Pavel Kushnir<\/a>, the pianist and poet from Birobidzhan, who spoke out against the war in Ukraine and paid the price with an unmarked grave in a mass grave near the detention centre where, according to the authorities, he died following a hunger strike. Being gay, Jewish and anti-war \u2013 that\u2019s all it takes to die in Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A play staged as a protest against the murder of political prisoners: that\u2019s the sort of thing we\u2019re happy to go to the theatre for. But for us, as residents of a free country, it\u2019s also a bit of a cop-out. That\u2019s what you realise when you go to see a play created by a whole team of Russian women who, for various reasons, have left the country they long for and\/or abhor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as the three sisters in Chekhov\u2019s play of the same name long for Moscow, the narrator in *Queer Quark* yearns for Birobidzhan. And that is complicated from the outset, because there is little to like about this city in the Far East of Russia, the capital of a Jewish state created by Stalin. The team includes women who have sometimes fled, and others who have remained in the Netherlands, feeling somewhat displaced, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Natalia Perel explained that her situation was even more complicated. As a Jew who had been oppressed in Russia, who had fled, and who was then condemned here as a Russian because of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine: \u201cAnd then came 7 October\u2026\u201d. Talk about complications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That, combined with the fact that family members left behind also need to be protected, means that the dialogue with the public is not as open and honest as we might hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turned out to be a complicated evening, with a play that could still do with some improvement if it were also performed in Russian or Yiddish, with surtitles. Perhaps it would then become even more complicated, but if this performance \u2013 followed by a post-show discussion \u2013 makes one thing clear, it is that you can only tackle a complicated reality with complicated art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s why you need a non-commercial festival like Amsterdam Fringe to see a production like this, one that isn\u2019t quite ready for the mainstream circuit. Because it teaches you that \u2018the stranger\u2019 is always worth the effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPolitical prisoners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Complications<\/h2>\n\n\n\n