ex Nuclear Soviet Era Bunker, is the Strangest Tourist Trap in Europe

Ginanne Brownell goes underground to find a recreation of the bad old days of Soviet rule in a disused bunker in Lithuania

As a German shepherd barks and lunges towards them, two dozen audience members scurry down a dimly lit hallway. An army officer, in a camouflage green wool overcoat and cap, menacingly directs them into a room that reeks of mildew and stale cigarettes. Once inside they are forced to face a wall — with their hands behind their backs — covered with a huge red and white Cyrillic banner that reads, “You should be careful and watchful.”

At first there is a smattering of tense giggles and sniggering banter, But over the next 10 minutes, as several people are pulled from the line and interrogated, it all gets rather serious. After being asked rapidfire questions in Russian such as, “Are you involved in selling drugs?” or “Why do you carry foreign currency?”, the unlucky few who have been picked on are either made to do push-ups, sit on their knees with their hands behind their heads or sent for several minutes to a dark cell. One woman who comes back into the room after her solitary confinement is told she must confess that she works as a prostitute and will therefore become a KGB informant. The dog sniffs and nudges at her while she shakily sits down to sign.

If it sounds like a scene taken from the Soviet Union circa 1984 then that is the whole point. The brainchild of Lithuanian theatre producer Ruta Vanagaite, Soviet Bunker — which is a part of the official program of events during Vilnius’s reign—shared with Linz, Austria — as European Capital of Culture 2009 — has been intriguing audiences with its Soviet realism for more than a year.

Soviet Bunker is part of a growing genre of site-specific theatre across the globe. It takes place in a disused bunker outside Vilnius, built in the mid-1980s for Lithuanian television to broadcast in case the capital came under nuclear attack—with performance art. The actors in Soviet Bunker are more like bossy improv artists who direct the audience through the five-metre-deep bunker; there is no fixed script and the actors’ interactions with the audience members are the mainstay of the show.

Similar performance concepts have made headlines in Britain, especially last summer’s debut of The Factory at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show, in which audience members ventured down dark tunnels and told to pretend they were going to be gassed at Auschwitz, was dubbed tastless by some critics, powerful by others. The same could be said for Soviet Bunker. There are elements that border on kitsch (for example getting to “shop” in a Communist-style grocery store) and other moments, such as when the audience is made to flee a room wearing gasmasks, which make the worst elements of the Soviet era come alive. “By taking people to these environments you are trying not just to tell a story that everyone knows and is familiar with,” says Nick Kaye, professor of performance studies at the University of Exeter. “You are attempting to open people’s eyes to something that they may not otherwise see.”

A discussion at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) earlier this year explored the integral role an audience plays in relation to theatre. Critically acclaimed shows like the Royal Court’s site-specific piece The Caravan, about the summer 2007 floods in England, have helped examine this conceit. “We are exposed to so much in terms of media and internet that we are numbed by it,” says Dominic Cooke, the artistic director of the Royal Court who participated in the ICA discussion. “The great thing about theatre that involves the spectator is that it forces the audiences to confront the reality that the play is trying to make them experience because there is no way you can hide from the reality of a world when you are actually physically part of it.”

It is the aspect of participation that is the major premise behind Soviet Bunker. “Our mobiles have screens, our computers have screens, our televisions have screens and traditional theatre is a screen because we as an audience are passively sitting there watching,” says Vanagaite. “The activeness of site-specific theatre was important for this show because you experience what it is like to be cold and to be afraid.”

The idea for the play was born out of Vanagaite’s concern that nostalgia for Communist times — spurred along by films like “Goodbye Lenin” and hit songs like Oleg Gazmanov’s “I Was Made in the USSR” — was either being viewed through rose-tinted glasses or seen as a quirky, almost humorously naïve time across Eastern Europe. A troubling recent opinion poll suggested that almost 60 percent of Lithuanians — who are members of both the EU and NATO — believe their society was more democratic during Soviet times. Those numbers made Vanagaite concerned that this current global economic crisis has led many Eastern Europeans in general to become wistful for things like the job security and guaranteed housing of the Soviet era. “Some people look back and say things were safer and more secure,” says Vanagaite. “Sure, you knew you had a holiday every year and free healthcare. But the shortages were miserable, the lack of human rights was awful and we had no freedom.”

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One of the stickiest aspects of putting Soviet Bunker together as a production was making sure it walked the fine line between telling a story that was true enough to reality without it being too scary or too kitsch. “What we do not need is a second amusement park to Communism in this country,” Vanagaite says, referring Lithuania’s Grutas Park, a theme park outside Vilnius dubbed “Stalin World”, which houses Soviet-era statues and a recreation of a Siberian gulag. “This show was a deliberate attempt to get the real thing.”

Those real aspects include everything from the hard cookies and barley coffee served on arrival (regular coffee was only for the privileged proletariat) to the scratchy blue and black coats audiences members must don during the show. The audience, who must each sign a disclaimer form, are then made to march outside to the beat of old Soviet military tunes and are shouted directions of how they must behave. “Your only duty is to obey me,” one of the gruff army officers tells the audience. “In the USSR there are no individuals, you all have collective responsibility and if anyone misbehaves, then you all suffer.” With that the audience is led down into bunker’s complex of tunnels and the next two hours are a whirlwind of mandatory chanting in unison, visits to the cranky doctor and ruminations on the glories of monotonous labour.

Martynas Kubilis, 25, says he barely remembers Lithuania’s Communist past but thinks the show helps set the record straight for those who get misty-eyed about Soviet times. “It’s good for younger generations to get a feeling for some of the hardships of everyday life,” he says. “Because it’s interactive it makes it all the more compelling.”

www.sovietbunker.comex-soviet bunker official site

by: Ginanne Brownell, Times Online 16-04-2009

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