Belarus Foreign Minister's wife pushes for drastic changes in local theater

On June 22, the Theater of Young Spectators, which was recently headed by the wife of Belarus' Minister of Foreign Affairs, will premiere a play based on Belarusian writer Vasil Bykau's "Alpine Ballad," the social feeds of the Youth Theater write.

The play is called "Alps. Forty-First" and has an age rating of "12+". The message also states that "the play is performed in Russian". The original text was written in Belarusian, and before Paliakova started working at the theater, it only staged performances in Belarusian. Having received the position, Vera Paliakova stated that she intended to abandon this practice. In her opinion, the Belarusian language gets in the way of making money. "Sticking only to the Belarusian language means losing some of the audience, for example, visitors to the city. I think that the performances should be in two languages," she said.

Thus, there are only five Belarusian-language theaters out of 29 professional ones left in Belarus.

Palyakova replaced Uladzimir Savitski as director of the theater. He had been in charge of the theater since 2010. When it happened, Minister of Culture Anatol Markevich said that more than 300 people had been fired from cultural institutions in Belarus for political views.