OREANDA-NEWS. October 02, 2008. International festival ‘A Theatre Week with Belgazprombank’ kicked off in Minsk. This year the event’s motto is ‘Viewing Shakespeare’s plays’, reported the press-centre of Belgazprombank.

On the occasion of the festival opening, Belgazprombank held a press conference featuring famous actors and directors of the theatres that participate in the event. Leading mass media of Belarus attended the conference.

Opening the meeting, Victor Babariko, chairman of Belgazprombank, said that the theatre festival is in line with the bank’s mission - forming a middle class in the country. “One of the features that define middle class is how people spend their incomes, this is actually what our business exists for. We came to understand that culture should be given a decent part in this spending,” he said.

The ‘Theatre Week’, a totally new event in Minsk’s cultural life, aroused great interest in mass media who flooded the festival organizers and theatre representatives with numerous questions.

The organizers were represented by Victor Babariko, Virginia Tarnauskajte, director of the Lithuanian Centre for Culture, Education and Information, and Antonina Mikhaltsova, secretary general of the Belarusian Centre of International Theatre Institute (UNESCO).

Theatres that participated in the festival were represented by Vladas Bagdonas, an actor at the Meno Fortas theatre who played the Othello part in Othello performance, Tauras Chizhas, head of Meno Fortas, Algirdas Latenas, head of the Lithuanian national youth theatre who staged Macbeth for Minsk’s Yanka Kupala theatre and Valentina Erenkova, director of Taming of the Shrew at the Maxim Gorky Theatre.