Cattrall champions fight against censorship
Sex and the City star joins line-up for Belarus Free Theatre concert
SEX and the City star Kim Cattrall is to champion freedom of speech as she joins musicians Neil Tennant and David Gilmour and actress Juliet Stevenson at a solidarity concert for a radical underground theatre company exiled from its native Belarus.
Cattrall said she wanted to take part in the event , c alled I’m With The Banned, because of her admiration for members of the outlawed Belarus Free Theatre whom she got to know when she was appearing on stage in London and they were at the Young Vic.
Speaking from Canada, where she is filming a new series of TV comedy S e n s i t i ve S k i n , Ca t t r a l l , 5 8 , said: “They’re my friends and they have had to battle for things we take for granted in the theatre community. For them, their whole expressive life has been almost criminalised. What they ’re doing takes tremendous fortitude and strength — to be uprooted and separated from your home, your history. But they continue to have a voice and it is a voice that needs to be heard and not silenced.”
The company was founded in 2005 by husband and wife Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin with Vladimir Shcherban in response to censorship in Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe, and was forced to operate underground. After arrests and imprisonment, they have been political refugees in Britain since 2011.
Cattrall said shifting world politics and events such as the mass surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden, who worked for US spying agency the NSA, made clear that the Belarusians were not the only people who should be concerned about their rights. “It could be you,” she said. “The Ed Snowden thing was a huge wake-up call to everyone — how private are our lives now?” The concert at Koko, Camden, on October 18 will include Russian punk activists Pussy Riot and Gilmour, from P ink Fl oyd, wil l appear with banned Belarusian musicians. Tennant has also been blacklisted in Belarus, alongside playwright Sir Tom Stoppard and actor Jude Law, after criticising the regime. Natalia Kaliada said dictators were afraid of artists. “Knowing that , we must work together to defend human rights and freedoms.”