![](https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Kristin-Milward-Credit-Charles-Flint-3-scaled-1.jpg)
Show: Two Ukrainian Plays
Society: London (professional shows)
Venue: Finborough Theatre. 118 Finborough Road, London SW10 9ED
Credits: TAKE THE RUBBISH OUT, SASHA by Natal’ya Vorozhbit & PUSSYCAT IN MEMORY OF DARKNESS by Neda Nezhdana. Produced by Handsome Dog Productions and Merchant Culture, and Marricdale Productions.
Type: Sardines
Author: John London
Performance Date: 11/08/2022
Two Ukrainian Plays
John London | 13 Aug 2022 12:33pm
What could be more relevant to the current conflict and, at over two hours, better value for money?
In Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha the husband of the title has died in the bathroom from a heart attack. He leaves behind his widow (Katya) and pregnant stepdaughter (Oksana) to cope economically, argue about his foibles, and judge the merit of his career as a colonel in the Ukrainian army.
What takes Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s play beyond a feminist, Ukrainian kitchen sink is the succession of three anomalous situations, each corresponding to a scene in the play. First, Sacha is there to face the accusations and actually engages in dialogue with the women. A year later, in the cemetery, the women now idolize him, converting the soldier into a hero instead of the useless layabout initially described so aggressively by Katya (Amanda Ryan). In the final scene Sacha returns: it’s September 2014 and a sixth wave of mobilization means he’s been called up to serve. Now he just needs to obtain ‘permission from living relatives’.
Since the immediate allusion here is to the Russian stealth invasion of the Donbas, there’s already a contradiction with what Katya says at the start: ‘There hasn’t been a war since anyone can remember.’ But nobody needed the audience sniggers to realize the contemporary irony. The trouble is that the script is short on this kind of socio-political collusion. Some aspirational, silent choreographed sequences and backwall projections give an idea of the inventive stage directions functioning as interpolations (‘Swimming naked at night ’). Meanwhile, the characterization is sketchy and Alan Cox’s Sasha is left in Svetlana’s Dimcovic’s direction as a wooden respondent to the women’s evocations.
Neda Nezhdana’s Pussycat in Memory of Darkness is also set in 2014, although you’d be forgiven for thinking it was 2022, particularly because of the final slides showing the date and bombed out buildings. As the subtitle explains, this is ‘A Farewell Monologue for Donbas’, based on documentary facts. One woman tells her story: of protest (in 1990 and 2014), of helping the resistance to the pro-Russian faction, of torture, and of defeat. Interrupting her narrative, she continually returns to a box with surviving kittens she’s trying to sell to passers-by.
Kristin Milward jostles to make the drama surpass the politics by varying her tone, moving confidently about the stage, and dexterously playing the role of her hostile neighbour arguing with herself. (Direction: Polly Creed.) There are still some dense moments in a discussion more suited to a TV debate: ‘Ordinary people throwing stones were fired on with machine guns from the roof, but because ours captured it, the house was targeted by Russian special forces, first with poison gas like that theatre in Moscow, then set on fire…’ This provides considerable details, but if you really want to trace the terror of today to the Maidan protest or Euromaidan (of 2013) then you would have to analyse the role of the EU and the Russophile corruption of the Ukrainian regime of the time.
So we must be grateful to translators Sasha Dugdale and John Farndon for bringing these plays to us. Though perhaps there’s another version of the events which would give a subtler picture, rather than the broad brushstrokes comfortably confirming we are sympathizing with the right side. We could well come to the same end point, but the journey might be a bumpier ride.