Review: Burning Doors

Europe's only banned theatre company - Belarus Free Theatre - have turned their focus to Russia, where Maria Alyokhina of the dissident protest band Pussy Riot was imprisoned. In something of a coup, Alyokhina herself joins BFT on stage here to relate the brutal psychological and physical mistreatment endured by her in Russian prisons. Strip searches - some while the prisoner is suspended from ropes - are apparently a favourite of the system.

The case of extreme political artist Petr Pavlensky - the man who nailed his scrotum to Red Square and who later set fire to the front door of Russia's secret service HQ in Moscow - is also represented, as is that of Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Stensov who has been jailed by a Russian court for 20 years on allegedly trumped-up charges of terrorism.

These three dissidents form the backbone of this pummeling, uninterrupted show. Each case is considered with heavy irony by a couple of suited Putin fixers.

Which artist should be released, and which incarcerated is a decision made in one scene while the duo sit opposite each other on loos. East European satire can come across as awfully heavy-handed in the west. But the cast evoke the brutality of the regimes they oppose by putting themselves through all manner of real and daunting physical hardship.