“Just imagine, you sit down in the evening, you talk to your friend….the next day that friend is kidnapped and killed. It was my husband and his friend Dmitry Zavadsky. They sat and discussed their lives, their wives and their children but the next day he was kidnapped and killed. Imagine that your father was beaten up near your apartment and the guy who did it says ‘don’t’ go to the police, I am from the police’. Imagine your two daughters aged 11 and 16 hiding a laptop computer when police come calling - this happened to MY two daughters.”

A slight, 30-something year old woman with a boyish haircut in jeans and denim jacket talks simply and seriously, without pathos or drama, not trying to impress or scare her audience but simply telling about her life in Belarus, a small country in the middle of Europe, ruled by the maverick dictator, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. She is Natalia Koliada, a founding director of the Belarus Free Theatre,an underground theatre group which was introduced by Sir Tom Stoppard at an event organised by Index on Censorship.
 
Sitting in a comfortable auditorium on London’s Farringdon Road, it is hard to imagine the life that Natalia and her husband, the playwright Nikolai Khalezin, lead in Minsk. But the audience which consists of British playwrights, actors, directors, writers, journalists and diplomats, does not suffer from a lack of imagination. Nikolai and Natalia look like characters from Stoppard’s play, Rock’n’Roll. They have certainly become characters of his life.
 
Five years ago, Stoppard received an email from Nikolai and Natalia announcing their existence. The letter’s English was heavily accented and the request was “almost heartbreakingly pathetic”. The two artists were asking for a message of support. “I have a big desk and a secretary and all kinds of equipment. I could tell my secretary ‘Give these people my message of support’ and then I could go to lunch.”

Instead, Stoppard went to Minsk, to meet Nikolai and Natalia, and their friends and the friends and relatives of people who had been murdered or beaten up. He talked about theatre with young playwrights and chatted about contemporary music with a local DJ.
 
I travelled to Mink with Stoppard who had just finished Rock’n’Roll, a play about dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Husak. The trip seemed like a continuation of the play or its afterlife. There are magical moments in Stoppard’s plays when characters touch a word or an object that puts them in touch with another character from different era. In Arcadia, a girl bites from an apple left on a desk by another girl two centuries earlier. This trip was one such moment.
 
Five years later Stoppard’s interest and support of the Free Belarus Theatre is as strong. Early this month Stoppard and the actor Sam West led a group of British artists to the Belarusian embassy to protest against a new law censoring the internet. There was no affectation in this action. It was the same sense of responsibility that took Stoppard to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1977 to accompany a friend from Amnesty International who visited Soviet dissidents.
 
Visiting Minsk five years ago, Stoppard talked about the prime importance of “hard-work gift” and talent in any artistic endeavour. No play, however political and worthy, can captivate the audience unless it is actually good. But without this sense of empathy and personal courage a play may not be much good either. “Courage is perhaps the most personal and fundamentally the most expressive of human hopes and human self-identity. Of all aspects of life art brings to the surface, the part of it which expresses us at our most intense is that part when we have to show just a little courage,” says Stoppard.
 
The Belarus Free Theatre has both talent and courage as its production of Numbers shows. Miming sketches and theatrical metaphors here are enhanced by dry and often bizarre statistics projected on a wall: 72% of Belarusians find it difficult to define the word democracy…every third Belarusian died in the Second World War… over 40% of the adult population want to leave Belarus… on October 15th 2006, 242 Belarusian cows broke through an electric fence, swam over the Bug river and illegally crossed the Polish border. According to the Polish border guards, this was the first case of such a mass crossing of domestic animals to the EU.

Just imagine.