“Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha” by Natal’ya Vorozhbit – the English premiere
“They’ve mobilised all the living now, the fifth call took the last of the living. But the war keeps on. So high command asked us.”
Katia and Oksana are organising Sasha’s funeral feast. The bereaved widow and daughter mourn for Sasha, a Colonel in the Ukrainian Army, who has dropped down dead suddenly of heart failure.
As war intensifies, a year after his death, the army has resorted to recruiting soldiers who are dead. Sasha is anxious to join his country’s fight, and ready to be resurrected, but his family are reluctant to bury him again. A family argument ensues, should Sasha volunteer again?
Ukrainian Hope by Nate Kitch
From Ukraine’s leading contemporary playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit (The Grain Store – Royal Shakespeare Company, and Bad Roads – Royal Court Theatre, and filmed as Ukraine’s official Oscar® selection in 2022), Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha, blends reality and the afterlife in a critical look at the effects of war and conflict.
“Pussycat in Memory of Darkness” by Neda Nezhdana – the first production outside Ukraine
“I want to report a robbery…I was robbed. What was stolen from me? Almost everything…Home, land, car, work, friends, city, faith in goodness…’”
Donbas, 2014. A nameless woman stands in the street. Wearing a pair of dark black sunglasses, she tries to sell a basket of kittens. She has lost everything else she holds dear: her home, her family, her hope.
Russia has taken over Crimea and stirred up ongoing violence in her beloved homeland of Donbas. Betrayed by her neighbour and brutalised by Russian-backed militia, her hope has waned for humanity. She can only now place her hope in finding a home for a basket of kittens, a home she cannot offer.
An urgent piece of new writing from Neda Nezhdana – in her UK debut – that starkly reveals the roots of Russia’s war on Ukraine through the brutalised eyes of one woman.
***Both plays are performed in English***
