My interview with EGBDF director Bob Hetherington was too brief and too chopped up but the points come across, I think. He said a lot when he encourages me (and everybody else) to Google “punitive psychology.” Because, if you do that (and I did) you’ll probably run across this story about Putin critic Larisa Arap. And it’s a story that anybody interested in Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn’s epic team up should know at least a little something about.
Naked and with her hands and feet bound to the corners of a metal bed covered by a rubber incontinence sheet, Larisa Arap eyed with quiet defiance the doctors who wanted to declare her mad.
It was a futile gesture. The men in white coats standing over her were bitter adversaries.
Enraged by the allegations that she had levelled against them, they also knew that, as an open Kremlin critic, the state would do little to help her.
A needle sank into her arm. Over the coming weeks, as the treatment took its effect, Mrs Arap would become everything the doctors declared her to be: her head lolled to one side, her tongue hung out of her mouth and her face went slack.
“When she was brought out she was covered in bruises,” said Taisia, her daughter. “She couldn’t stand, could hardly speak and was drifting in and out of consciousness.” READ THE REST HERE
And here’s a teaser from Playhouse on the Square…
For ticket information go here.
