DIARY OF A UKRAINIAN MADMAN Comes to the Finborough Theatre

The world premiere of Diary of a Ukrainian Madman or The Innocence of the Pangolins, a new comedy inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s classic Diary of a Madman by Ukrainian playwright and artist Liudmyla Tymoshenko, will open at the Finborough Theatre for a three week limited season on Tuesday, 13 August 2024 (Press Nights: Thursday, 15 August 2024 and Friday, 16 August 2024 at 7.30pm).
 

A fabulously surreal reworking of Ukrainian-born novelist and playwright Nikolai Gogol’s original, reimagined for a contemporary Ukraine racked by Covid and war.

Lonely, eccentric pharmacist Vasyl Petrovych works long hours and night shifts in the dingy pharmacy that is almost his home.

Harassed by his dreadful boss Serhiy, the boss’s wife Valentina and junior colleague Stepan, he retreats into a rich fantasy life where he is on the verge of discoveries that will change the world.
 
His sanity might have survived the pandemic and the Russian invasion, just…until he falls in love with the boss’s beautiful daughter Stefania…
 

On a set that is part modern pharmacy, part alchemist’s laboratory and part madhouse, a gallery of Gogolian grotesques drifts through time and space in a headlong flight of wild imagination and fantastical humour.

The cast includes an array of Finborough Theatre favourites including Kevin Trainor (Yes So I Said Yes), Kristin Milward (OffWestEnd Award nominated Best Actor for Pussycat in Memory of Darkness) and Edmund Dehn who appeared in  the opening production of the Finborough Theatre in 1980 and has since appeared in more Finborough Theatre productions than any other actor; alongside new talent Lottie Furzer and Archie Redford.
 

Playwright Liudmyla Tymoshenko was born in North Kazakhstan in 1978. She is a playwright, screenwriter, artist and university lecturer from Kyiv, and was also a co-founder of the Playwrights' Theatre of Kyiv. Her productions include Once Upon a Time in Morske (Sviya Theatre Zaporizhzhia, Garmyder Theatre, Lutsk), Five Songs of Polissya (Maria Zankovetska Theatre, Lviv), Uncle Misha Passes by (Maly Theatre, Kyiv), Refugee Cats (Bavka Transcarpathian Regional Puppet Theatre, Sunshine Children’s Theatre, Kyiv, Water is Memory Festival, Vichy, and Rivne Regional Puppet Theatre). She has been a nominee and winner of numerous national and international playwriting competitions and festivals. Five Songs of Polissya received the Grand Prix in the July Honeycompetition, and won the Drama on the Move competition from the Ukrainian Institute, and she was twice finalist in the ‘UA’ playwriting competition. Diary of A Ukrainian Madman was shortlisted for both the Polish ‘Aurora’ playwriting competition for writers from Central and Eastern Europe, and the Ukrainian ‘UA’ Drama Competition in 2023.Two premieres of her plays were scheduled for February-May 2022 in Kyiv and Lviv, cancelled due to the war.

Novelist and playwright Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was Ukrainian by birth and upbringing, the son of a gifted father who wrote plays, poems and sketches in Ukrainian. The trilingual Gogol’s life and works (Polish was his third language) epitomize the complex relationship between Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Best known for his novel Dead Souls and plays The Government Inspector and The Marriage. Gogol's prose is characterized by imaginative power and linguistic playfulness. As an exposer of grotesque in human nature, Gogol has often been compared with Hieronymus Bosch, and is seen by most critics as the first Russian realist whose biting satire, comic realism, and descriptions of provincials and petty bureaucrats influenced later masters like Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and especially, his fellow Ukrainian renegade, Mikhail Bulgakov. Gogol’s 1835 masterpiece Diary of a Madman can be seen as an eerie premonition of his own demise. In his later life, he came under the influence of a fanatical priest, and, after refusing to eat and enduring various horrific medical ‘treatments’, he died on the verge of madness.
 
Translator John Farndon returns to the Finborough Theatre where he translated Neda Nejdana's Pussycat in Memory of Darkness and Inna Goncharova’s The Trumpeter. He is a writer, poet, playwright, songwriter and translator of literature from Eurasia, including many plays for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings series, including Polina Pologonceva’s Save the Light and Andriy Bondarenko’s Fox Dark as Light Night (Baron’s Court Theatre), Neda Nejdana’s He Who Opens the Door (A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Òran Mór, Glasgow, and Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh) and Neda Nejdana’s Closed Sky (Wiesbaden Staatstheater in a Ukrainian production from Kyiv). His own plays include Anya (Donmar Warehouse), High Risk Zone (Almeida Theatre), The Naked Guest (Pleasance Edinburgh), Lope De Vega’s verse play Dog in a Manger (Cockpit Theatre), an adaptation of Mozart’s Il Seraglio (Plymouth Theatre Royal, Salisbury Playhouse and Riverside Studios, London) and Puccini's La Boheme (Arcola Theatre). He was joint winner of 2019 EBRD Literature Prize for translating poetry in Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance, and finalist for 2020 US PEN Translation Award for Kazakh writer Rollan Seysenbaev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert. He is also a judge for the OffWestEnd Theatre Awards. He has written over a thousand books on science, nature and other topics. He has been shortlisted five times for the Young People’s Science Book Prize. www.johnfarndon.com

Director Chris Loveless returns to the Finborough Theatre where his productions include Lullabies of Broadmoor – A Broadmoor Quartet and The Demon Box (Vibrant – A Festival of Finborough Playwrights). London theatre includes Tess of the D’Urbervilles (New Wimbledon Studio), Bel-Ami (Charing Cross Theatre), Diary of a Madman (New Wimbledon Studio and national tour), Five Kinds of Silence (White Bear Theatre), an Evening Standard Critics’ Choice for The Remains of the Day (Union Theatre), a Time Out Critics’ Choice’s for both Moonshadow and The Custom of the Country (White Bear Theatre), Stairway to Heaven for which he was nominated for the OffWestEnd Award for Best Director (Blue Elephant Theatre) and Dracula (White Bear Theatre). Regional and international theatre includes The Beast Will Rise, People are Cats People are Dogs, The Tragicomical 'istory of 'Arry (all Edinburgh Fringe), Ne dis rien a personne (Saint Pierre Lycée, Vichy), Normal(Tobacco Factory, Bristol), Ray Collins Dies On Stage, Dust to Dust (Alma Theatre, Bristol) and 24 Hour Plays (Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath). He trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and is an Associate Director of Stepping Out Theatre, and a former Associate Director of both the White Bear Theatre and The Ashton Group.
 

Stepping Out Theatre are the UK’s leading mental health theatre company working with theatre professionals and mental health service users to put compelling human stories on stage. Their Associate Director Chris Loveless returns to the Finborough Theatre where he directed Stepping Out Theatre’s production of Steve Hennessy’s acclaimed quartet of plays about famous murderers, Lullabies of Broadmoor – A Broadmoor Quartet.

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