The BFT is a political theatre company. For them, that title does not mean smug satire directed at coalition spending cuts, nor impassioned pleas to do something about global warming. It means an attack on their home country's brutal government, the last dictatorship in Europe, which has exiled the whole cast for their dissent. I have never seen a performance that felt so forcefully true – the oppression portrayed had touched each one of the performers.

The cast presented a brilliantly innovative, at times honestly funny, series of tableaus and skits on what it means to be a sexual being in a totalitarian country. A garishly choreographed striptease was examined by a bespectacled, impassive government mandarin for any sign of "artistic merit"; a workers's canteen was transformed by night into an  gay nightclub; a man described every scar on his body from his myriad beatings in detail, because in Minsk "scars make you sexy". In the breathtaking centrepiece, a woman reciting a monologue of how she was forced by the state into an abortion is stripped naked, smothered in black by paint rollers, and then wrapped in a vast sheet of paper, struggling to continue as her mouth is slowly constricted. The scene had a deep symbolic resonance on a level I found very uncomfortable to watch.

The end of the piece involved the cast sitting on chairs in a line, speaking as themselves. One said, "by 31st August, we will be unemployed". The date was the 29th. The cast can only work as long as they can perform in foreign countries; there is no going back for them. Another asked what they were doing this for. Belarus had nothing, he said, no natural beauty or resources or friendly people or any reason to love it. So why did he want to go back? Why did he insist on fighting for it, on speaking out? None of them answered the question. Minsk is simply our home, was the unspoken reply.

Then they slowly lifted a red carpet over their heads, drowning in a sea of blood as they sang a Belarusian folk song. They got an instant universal standing ovation, perhaps as much for the need to react, to physically agree with these people, as any comment on the performance. As we restart the regular drumbeat of new Cambridge shows, it is good to remember that there are places in the world where just the act of putting on a play remains a revolutionary gesture.