Adelaide Fringe review 2019: Pussy Riot: Riot Days

Riot Days is a play, a rock show, a book reading and a protest. It’s loud, confronting, even gruelling at times, but it will make you think and it will make you feel and that’s what good art should do.

Russian protest group Pussy Riot performing at the RCC Fringe on February 27, 2019. Picture: Tony Kearney

Pussy Riot: Riot Days

Theatre

Rating: ****

The Attic, RCC

Until March 3

Riot Days is a play, a rock show, a book reading and a protest. It’s loud, confronting, even gruelling at times, but it will make you think and it will make you feel and that’s what good art should do.

Based on Maria “Masha” Alyokhina’s memoir, Riot Days is essentially the story of the Russian feminist group’s most famous protest, Punk Prayer, which saw the outfit smuggle instruments and their now famous balaclavas into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The “performance” drew the ire of Vladimir Putin and the Russian authorities and saw Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova spend two years in remote prisons.

Riot Days is essentially the six members of the band – singing and speaking in Russian and accompanying themselves with drum machine, trumpet and sax – telling the story of the protest, the subsequent arrest and trial, and Alyokhina’s time in prison.

A screen behind the performances shows the English surtitles, footage from the trial and animated montages of important scenes.

There are touching moments, like when the diminutive Russian talks about leaving her baby son behind, and even some funny lines – “we knew they were agents because of their pointy shoes. That’s what they think fashion is” – but mostly it’s a harrowing hour that will leave you shaking your head at the group’s commitment to the cause and unflinching bravery.

- Nathan Davies