13 Jun 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, brave journalists have travelled across the country gathering testimonies from civilians about war crimes committed by the Russian army.
It’s a crucial, difficult and sometimes deadly job – the tragic killing of journalist and writer Victoria Amelina is a stark reminder of this – but these accounts now form a vast database of evidence documenting the atrocities of war inflicted on Ukrainian citizens.
That’s why the recent play The Reckoning, co-written and directed by Dash Arts co-founder Josephine Burton, currently showing at the Arcola Theatre in London, is so powerful. The production is drawn from real testimonies of survivors of Russian oppression in Ukraine, collected by The Reckoning Project – an organisation recording, preserving and conserving witness statements from across the country.
The play follows the story of a journalist (played by Marianne Oldham) travelling around Ukraine to collect these testimonies. As part of her work, she meets “The Man from Stoyanka” (played by Tom Godwin), a security guard who chooses to stay rather than flee as Russian forces approach a village in Ukraine. He recounts to her his traumatic imprisonment by Russian soldiers, who ultimately decide to let him go.
As he shares his experience, the audience is confronted with the many ways in which war pushes people to their very limits: the inner strength we don’t know we have, the instinctive courage to help others, but also the enduring pain of trauma and guilt as ordinary people try to navigate a new and brutal reality.
The play owes much of its emotional resonance to two Ukrainian actors, Olga Safronova and Simeon Kyslyi, who embody the testimonies of innocent civilians while also sharing their own lived experiences of the war. Halfway through the show, to ease the heaviness of the topics covered on stage, they play a game together recalling the positive things happening in their lives. It is this blend of personal witness, light comedy and bittersweet nostalgia that underscores the horror of the crimes committed against Ukraine.
There are moments of relief. One of the most memorable is the making of a Ukrainian summer salad, which the audience watches being prepared and are then invited to eat together at the end of the play. The intimacy of the space, with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides, and the deliciously simple dish unite the viewers and actors. The smell of fresh dill was so evocative that it moved some audience members to tears.
At the end of each performance, Dash Arts invites different individuals and organisations to bring a speaker to the stage to reflect on the play. Last week, Index on Censorship’s editor-at-large, Martin Bright, paid tribute to an individual killed during the war: Victoria Roshchyna. Roshchyna was a fearless Ukrainian journalist with an essential voice who reported from the front lines. In August 2023, she was captured by Russian soldiers while travelling to eastern Ukraine. She died a year later, aged just 27, in Russian custody. A forensic exam showed multiple signs indicative of torture and inhuman treatment.
In her memory, Bright read out Roshchyna’s harrowing account originally written for Index in April 2022, describing an earlier kidnapping by Russian forces while she was en route to Mariupol.
Just as the actors had tried to find a glimmer of hope amidst the devastating stories of war, Bright too sought to shed a positive message following Roshchyna’s death.
“There’s not a lot of good in this [war],” said Bright. “Except I do hope that the publishing of Victoria’s words will retain something of the spirit of Ukraine for the future.”
It is the words of Roshchyna, Amelina, and all the civilians who have shared their stories that will keep the spirit of Ukraine alive for generations to come.
The Reckoning is now showing at the Arcola Theatre in London until 28 June 2025.
18 Mar 2025 | Africa, News and features, South Africa
Gavin Hood directed the 2006 Best Foreign Language Academy Award winning film Tsotsi, based on the acclaimed novel by South Africa’s greatest playwright, the late Athol Fugard. Hood only met Fugard once but the writer’s influence on him has been deep and profound. Index on Censorship asked Hood to offer his personal thoughts on the impact of the legendary artist on his own life and work.
“Decency. You know the word, Tsotsi? Decency? I had a little bit of it, so I was sick. And that big one tonight, with the tie… he had a lot. So, he’s dead.”
It’s 2004. Actor Mothusi Magano, playing self-loathing, guilt-ridden drunk Boston, spits the slurred words at Presley Chweneyagae, the lead in a film I’m directing based on Athol Fugard’s haunting, redemptive masterpiece, Tsotsi. Boston is sickened by his participation in the murder of a dignified older man, stabbed just an hour earlier for nothing more than a few notes in his wallet.
Chweneyagae, chillingly silent, rocks back and forth ever so slightly, an unstoppable rage building behind his hooded eyes. He suddenly launches a vicious attack on Boston, who, like Fugard, just won’t stop talking about human dignity and compassion, even in the face of brutality.
Tsotsi is Fugard’s only novel. He is celebrated around the world as South Africa’s greatest ever playwright – and that is how I first encountered him. It was 1977. I was 13 years old, and attending a privileged, all-white, private boys’ school, when my parents took me to see The Island at The Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg.
Fugard wrote the explosive two-handed epic in collaboration with his Tony Award winning stars, the legendary South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Less than a year earlier, the two actors had been jailed for their performance in another Fugard play, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which the apartheid authorities claimed contained “inflammable, abusive and vulgar subject matter”.
Bluntly, I had never seen Black actors performing in a theatre before. I think my mother, who was a high-school English, French and History teacher, had heard that The Island referenced Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, because I vaguely recall her outlining the plot of that play and saying she understood that The Island would also be about defying repressive authority.
Despite the heads up, I was hardly prepared for the raw, visceral power of a tale of human dignity and resistance by two prisoners rehearsing Antigone on a prison island that was clearly a stand in for Robben Island, where the world’s most famous political prisoner Nelson Mandela had been held since 1964.
Through the turbulent 1980s, I studied law at The University of the Witwatersrand. From the relative safety of my liberal white status, I worked at the Wits law clinic, briefly representing a few impoverished clients; I attended my fair share of student protests, got teargassed, and even got arrested once, just for an afternoon for attending a banned Winnie Mandela gathering on campus; I wrote a newspaper article questioning the neutrality of a newly appointed Chief Justice – which got me an unsettling call ominously declaring, “You must be careful what you write” – and I performed in a number of not too controversial theatre productions.
But through all those confounding formative years – marred by state violence I only ever experienced tangentially – I attended every Fugard play that came to The Market Theatre, from Hello and Goodbye to The Road to Mecca to Master Harold… and the Boys. I marvelled at how his intimate, tightly coiled works spoke so bravely and elegantly about the personal moral dilemmas, regrets, and reconciliations of ordinary, imperfect people living under a soul-crushing system. His art gnawed at my conscience while, at the same time, expressing an unyielding optimism and hope.
I completed my degree, worked briefly for a commercial law firm, left to pursue a career as a professional actor and then, in mid-1989, facing a rising risk of being called up to join a military camp to serve in the townships that were quite literally on fire, I secured a student visa to study screenwriting and directing at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and left South Africa for the USA.
Unbelievably, just a few months later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the “Rooi Gevaar” (the “Red Communist Danger”) British and American support for the apartheid regime evaporated and by 1994 I was back in the New South Africa, now led by President Mandela, working for the new Department of Health on HIV / AIDS educational dramas for television.
Fugard was still writing plays, and I was once again watching productions like Valley Song at theatres like The Baxter in Cape Town.
Fast forward to 2000 when, after some minor successes at festivals with a short film ironically starring Fugard’s long-time collaborator Winston Ntshona, and a low-budget first feature, I was asked by producer Peter Fudakowski if I might consider adapting Fugard’s novel, Tsotsi. “Have you read it?” he asked. “Years ago,” I said – which was true!
I read it again immediately. The book is very internally focused, with the emotional and moral conflicts of its title character mostly conveyed through moving inner monologues, which are notoriously difficult to translate into the visual medium of film.
I called Fudakowski back and reluctantly said a screen adaptation would likely require me to take some liberties with the plot and structure – and I was not at all sure how Fugard might feel about that.
Fudakowski called Fugard’s agent. Would he be willing to discuss the adaptation with Gavin and perhaps collaborate with him through the process?
“No,” came Fugard’s blunt reply through his agent a day later. “Athol is a playwright. He tried making a film once and he didn’t enjoy the process. He wishes you only the best and, when the film is complete, he’d love to see it – before it’s released. If he likes it, he’ll say so. If not, he will keep silent, and the critics will say whatever they say.”
I was shaken. It’s not unusual for those who love a book to loathe a film adaptation. Often rightly. What if Fugard hated the film? “What if the critics hate the film?” Fudakowski replied – and decided to hire me anyway.
Cut to five long years later and the film is finally complete. I have just dropped off a print (back then the cinemas still screened reels of film!) and I am sitting with my wife, Nerissa, in a coffee shop a block away from a small art house cinema in San Diego. We are waiting for a call from the projectionist to tell us that Fugard has arrived for a private screening.
The phone rings. He has arrived, with his poet and novelist wife, Sheila Meiring Fugard, and close friend Marianne McDonald, distinguished professor of theatre and classics at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). They are settling in. The screening will be over in approximately 90 minutes.
I push my coffee aside. My stomach acid is already surging, and my heart is pounding. Fugard’s agent has said Fugard has my cell number. If he likes the film, he will call me after the screening. If he doesn’t, I should please be discreet and allow him to leave without a meeting.
Okay. We wait. I don’t recall what Nerissa and I talked about to kill the time but finally my phone rings. “Unknown caller”. I answer – and a thick, sonorous South African accent fills my ear.
“Gavin, where are you? You must come for dinner! I know a great South African chef right here in San Diego. He will deliver to Marianne’s house. It’s not far. Lamb chops, boerewors, babotie, pap, chakalaka, whatever you like. We must talk. Where are you?”
“I’m a block away,” I say, still not sure if his enthusiasm means he liked the film.
“No man, come, get over here. I loved it! You made changes, I know. But thank you for staying true to the spirit of Tsotsi. That young actor, Presley, he’s extraordinary. They all are. The whole cast. Can you come for dinner?”
And so, I finally meet Athol Fugard.
Nerissa and I went for dinner at Marianne’s beautiful home – an old stone-walled monastery. I recall a huge spread on a very long kitchen table. And Fugard talking and talking and pacing around the room with a chop in one hand, never sitting down, asking a million questions about where we’d filmed and how we’d found such wonderful actors, and the challenges of novel writing, playwriting and screenwriting, and saying how the entire crew had done us all proud.
Yes, it is true that in adapting Tsotsi for the screen I took liberties to interpret emotional shifts through action and non-verbal cues. I also updated the time period from 1950s apartheid South Africa to what was then present day in the new South Africa. I did so to reflect the deep scars inflicted by the system through segregation, forced removals and so-called “Bantu education”, which will take decades to heal from. But the core story, the central themes of redemption and the uniquely original principal characters are all Fugard’s, not mine. It is his generous spirit, his cry for basic human decency and compassion toward our fellow human beings that infuses the film.
Athol, I am forever grateful for the privilege of bringing your beautiful novel to the screen. Thank you for your timeless inspiration – your courage in confronting injustice with moral clarity, and your unwavering human decency. Rest well, sir.
3 Mar 2023 | FEATURED: Francis Clarke, News and features, Ukraine
You are handed a piece of paper as you enter the room. Move around, come up close, move away, sit down, do what you want; it instructs. All it asks is you be present together (and, naturally in the modern age, turn off your mobile phone).
Eventually everybody pulls up a chair, but the conformity of the audience doesn’t extend to the performance. A mixture of song, dance, poetry and performance art, Bunker Cabaret is a creative explosion.
Performed at Somerset House in Central London by the Hooligan Art Community, Bunker Cabaret is billed as an “exploration of love versus totalitarianism, and the personal conflicts of making art in time of war.” Formed in Kyiv in 2019, two of its male actors, Sam Kyslyi and Danylo Shramenko, developed scenes in a bomb shelter in the city, which would become the inspiration for the show. Leaving Ukraine, they were joined later by other members including Mirra Zhuchkova, who earlier escaped to Germany.
Photo by Steve Tanner
Bunker Cabaret opens with Kyslyi stood on a bed of fairy lights, interspersing elegant dancing with shadow boxing. The fusing of beauty with brutality, which one would imagine was how the seeds of the show were sown, is evident.
The audience is dropped into an animated conversation between Kyslyi and Shramenko. Almost childlike, it’s a game of “guess this noise”, which seems innocent enough until the correct answers compose of weaponry and warcraft. The lived experience of being trapped in a war zone is conveyed by the ability to note the difference in sound between a MiG-29 and a MiG-31.
A series of monologues are performed, including from Zhuchkova. Hers are dreamlike, almost abstract (and nightmarish), perhaps reflecting the pain of being torn away from home, and the hope of one day returning. The sound of fireworks punctuates the end of her final speech, with a strong, unifying gesture for each person in the audience. Kyslyi’s monologues are more real and descriptive of his experience, often resulting into a burst of song at the end.
Loud traffic passes outside the large windows of the room, where people could easily peek inside. This seems like a conscious decision, and like the instructions given at the start, the audience and environment play a part of the performance just as much as the actors in the room.
Ukrainian artists have been targeted since the Russian occupation and assault began. The attacks on Kyiv killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famous actress Oksana Shvet. Musicians, painters and photographers are among those killed so far; an attempt to erase Ukraine’s cultural and artistic contributors.
Despite being under attack, closed Ukrainian cultural institutions have started to programme again. Several branches of the National Art Gallery in Lviv reopened, as well as The Theater on Podil in Kyiv. Still, the circumstances for art and artists in Ukraine remains challenging.
Bunker Cabaret is not a conventional performance, but neither are the circumstances that brought it to Somerset House. It’s a paean to the fortitude of art in the hardest of conditions.
Bunker Cabaret is currently on a UK tour. Dates and ticket details are here.
30 Dec 2021 | Artistic Freedom, Magazine, News and features, Turkey, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras, Wales
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”118071″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]I am a woman kicked out of Heaven.
I am a writer tried for treason, facing life in prison.
I am an exile defined as others.
I am autistic, pushing myself to be normal.
Only to become invisible.
I’m 52 years old. Since childhood, I have always felt alienated from my environment. The more petulant I became, the more walls I built between myself and the world, the greater the desire to flee grew. Not knowing from whom and from what I’m running away, only having the desire to shelter somewhere else, anywhere else. It is hard to be weird and different to others but not know why.
It has done irreparable damage to my self-esteem. I felt trapped inside a cocoon woven of my unhappiness. I was a thing apart. Other people were strictly separate from me. I felt this separation keenly.
This distinction was so clear in my childhood, as a young girl and even now it is the same…
For years, I established completeness in my inner world with all my broken fragments. Without expectation, motionless, distant, introverted. I drowned in words, definitions, tasks… I forgot my essence. I learned to mask myself because I have always been judged.
I have a lot of voices in my mind, ghosts of decades-old voices. Telling me how I should be…
In 2011 I wrote an absurd play called Mi Minör set in a fictional country called Pinima. During the performance, the audience could choose to play the President’s deMOCKracy game or support the Pianist’s rebellion against the system. The Pianist starts reporting all the things that are happening in Pinima through Twitter, which starts a role-playing game (RPG) with the audience. Mi Minör was staged as a play where an actual social media-oriented RPG was integrated with the physical performance. It was the first play of its kind in the world.
Blamed for the Gezi Park protests
A month after our play finished, the Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul started. On 10 June 2013, the pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak came out bearing the headline ‘What A Coincidence’, accusing Mi Minör of being the rehearsal for the protests, six months in advance. The article continued, “New information has come to light to show that the Gezi Park protests were an attempted civil coup” and claimed that “the protests were rehearsed months before in the play called Mi Minör staged in Istanbul”.
After Yeni Şafak’s article came out, the mayor of Ankara started to make programmes on TV specifically about Mi Minör, mentioning my name.
In one he showed an edited version of one of the speeches that I made six years ago about secularism, misrepresenting what I said in such a way that it looked like I was implying that secularism was somehow antagonistic to religion.
What I found so brutal was that the mayor did this in the knowledge that religion has always been one of the most sensitive subjects in Turkey. What upset me most was the fear I witnessed in my son’s eyes and the anxiety that my partner was living through.
Arikan interviewed over Mi Minor
The play was being discussed regularly on TV, websites and online forums and both Mi Minör and my name were being linked to a secret international conspiracy against Turkey and its ruling party, the AKP. Many of the comments referenced the 2004 banning of my book Stop Hurting my Flesh. I received hundreds of emails and tweets threatening rape and death as a result of this campaign.
For three nightmarish months, we were trapped in our own house and did not set foot outside. One day, I saw that one of my prominent accusers was tweeting about me for four hours. The sentences he chose to tweet were all excerpts from my research publication The Body Knows, taken out of context and manipulating what I had written. Those tweets were the last straw.
Wales is protecting me
I left our house, our loved ones, our pasts. We left in a night with a single suitcase and came to Wales, which had always been my dream country. I never imagined my arrival in Cardiff would be like this; feeling bitter, broken and incomplete.
Two years later my partner, who had remained in Turkey, and I got married. In the first month, I learned my husband had brain cancer. Operations, chemotherapy, radiotherapy followed… Within a year, I lost him. I visited him, but sadly I wasn’t able to go to his funeral because of new accusations levelled against me. This was a turning point in my life. I lost my husband. I lost my trust in people. I lost my savings to pay for his care. I lost everything.
In all of this emotional turmoil, I started walking every day for five or six hours. Geese became my best friend and my remedy. I walked for months. I walked and walked everywhere, in the mountains, in the valleys, at the seaside.
These walks had a transformative effect on me. I had discovered a way to live as a woman who had learned to accept herself, rather than a shattered and a lost woman.
Maybe there is an umbilical cord, beyond my consciousness, between me and the wild nature of Wales. I feel this land always wrapped itself around me, talked to me like a mother during the difficult time in my life. For this reason, I wrote my latest play; Y Brain/Kargalar (Crows), written in Welsh and Turkish and produced by Be Aware Productions. It describes my story, the special place this land has in my life and how it transformed me. The title refers to my constant companions during this time – the crows. One reviewer called it “unashamedly lyrical…even as it touches on dark themes”.
On 20 February 2019, as the play was being staged, a new indictment was issued against 16 people, including me, over Mi Minör; I now face a life sentence. Because of this absurd accusation, I feel ever more strongly that Wales is protecting me.
My diagnosis
It was at this time that I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome/autistic spectrum disorder and I’ve received many answers about myself as a result. From this moment, a new discovery and understanding started. I set out to discover myself with this new knowledge. As soon as I could know who I’m not, I could find out who I am.
I realise that my wiring system simply makes it harder for me to do many things that come naturally to other people. On the flip side, it is important to be aware that autism can also give me many magical perceptions that many neurotypicals simply are not capable of. I believe I was able to write Mi Minör because of my different perceptions.
I have therapy twice a week and I have started to understand what I have been through all my life. My therapists told me that I was manipulated and I was emotionally and sexually abused by whom I love and trust the most; it was a big shock for me. I spent half of my life trying to help abused victims, and I never thought I was a victim. They said this is very common because autistic women are not aware of when they were used. How could I have been so blind?
I couldn’t work out that I was being played by others, like a fish on a line. As an autistic, communication is about interpreting with a basic belief in what people tell me because I don’t tell lies myself. But I have learned how much capacity for lies exists. Autistic people can be gullible, manipulated and taken advantage of. But I learned that regret is the poison of life, the prison of the soul.
The most significant benefit of this process is that I am learning again like a child to re-evaluate everything with curiosity and enthusiasm. It also gives me the chance to reconstruct the rest of my life without hiding myself, being subjugated to anyone, and living without fear.
Autism diagnosis and discovery were liberating for me. There is still not enough autism spectrum awareness even today. That is why I decided to come out about my autism. I strongly believe that if those of us who are on the autistic spectrum share our experiences openly, then it wouldn’t only help other autistic people, it would help neurotypical people to better understand both us and our behaviour.
Looking back at the last few years, I have been thrown into navigating most of the challenging aspects and life experiences and there has been a complete cracking of all masks.
This process is not easy at all, sometimes my soul, sometimes my heart, sometimes all my cells hurt, but it also causes me to recognise a liberation I have never known before.
Fortunately, during this process, I have been learning a lot about myself and how I have masked myself as an Aspie-woman… For me, masking myself is more harmful even than not knowing I’m autistic. Masking means that I create a different Meltem to handle every situation. I have never felt a strong connection with my core. When I am confronted with emotional upset, my brain immediately goes into “fix it” mode, searching for a way to make the other person feel better so I can also relieve my own distress.
For most of my life, I’ve allowed myself to fit in with how I thought others wanted me to feel and act, especially those I loved. My dark night gave me so much pain I broke free and started to care for myself and heal. Taking me back to my primordial self, not the heroic one that burns out, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spiritual parts of nature, my own nature and the person I was at the beginning.
The last two years have been exciting for me. It is as if I died and was reincarnated again. In the end, I understand that my true nature is not to be some ideal that I have to live up to. It’s ok to be who I am right now, and that’s what I can make friends with and celebrate. I learned it’s about finding my own true nature and speaking and acting from that. Whatever our quality is, that’s our wealth and our beauty. That’s what other people respond to. I’m not perfect, but I’m real…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
