I WANT TO GO HOME Excerpt Premieres as Part of the Finborough Theatre's #VoicesFromUkraine

The Finborough Theatre’s ongoing #VoicesFromUkraine season continues with a short video excerpt from Oksana Savchenko’s 2022 play, I Want To Go Home, premiering FREE-TO-VIEW on the Finborough YouTube channel on Thursday, 31 August 2023 at 9.00am, and concurrently on Scenesaver with subtitles.

This new video release premieres on the same day that the Finborough Theatre production of Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, also directed by Polly Creed,  performs for the second time in Kyiv. Pussycat was the first play performed in Ukraine by a foreign company since the Russian invasion, and has since played in Germany and the USA. It now performs again in Kyiv at the Pro-English Theatre of Ukraine on 31 August and 2 September 2023.
 
“War is when you can't breathe. Out of hatred. War is when your body is convulsed with pain for fear for your relatives. It is when you escape abroad with your child and spend all your time scrolling through the news.”

A woman waiting out the war in Europe attempts to make sense of what has befallen Ukraine following Russia's attack on her nation. She is angry, and confused, and she misses her boyfriend, who remained behind to fight…

Playwright Oksana Savchenko is a citizen of Ukraine, born and raised in Kyiv. She is a screenwriter, playwright, and journalist. As a screenwriter, has worked with television channels TRK Ukraine, Inter, and with the FILM.UA media company. As a playwright she participated at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt Theater Festival (2017) in Germany, the international Telpa Daugavpils festival in Latvia (2014), and the Contemporary Play Week in Kyiv. She has collaborated with Georg Genoux and Natalka Vorozhbyt’s Theater of Displaced People. In 2011, she participated in The Royal Court Theatre’s London programme for Ukrainian playwrights.

Translator John Farndon is a writer, poet, playwright and songwriter living in London, and a translator of literature from Eurasia, including many plays for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings series. He has written over a thousand books on science, nature and other topics, translated into most languages, and include many international best-sellers. He has been shortlisted five times for the Young People’s Science Book Prize. His 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) and an adaptation of Mozart’s Il Seraglio (Plymouth Theatre Royal, Salisbury Playhouse and Riverside Studios, London). His translations of the poetry of Lidia Grigorieva were nominated for five major awards, including the Griffin. He was joint winner of the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize for translating the poetry in Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance, and finalist for the 2020 US PEN Translation Award for his translation of Kazakh writer Rollan Seysenbaev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert. He has also translated the lyrics of Vladimir Vysotsky. A large bilingual collection of his own poetry is currently being published in Uzbek and English. He ran the Arc venue at the Edinburgh Fringe and also the Cauldron­­­ series of poetry and music events. He was a Royal Literary Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and City and Guilds in London and was chairman of the Eurasian Creative Guild 2019-2021. He is also a judge for New Plays, Most Promising New Playwrights, Production and Performance Pieces for the OffWestEnd Theatre Awards. Recently, his translations of Ukrainian plays have been presented in readings all over the world, including world premieres of two of his translations Polina Pologonceva’s Save the Light and Andriy Bondarenko’s Fox Dark as Light Night opened recently at Barons Court Theatre in London, and Neda Nezhdana’s He Who Opens the Door will open at A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Òran Mór, Glasgow, in August.

www.johnfarndon.com

Translator Natalia Bratus was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. She graduated in 1982 from the Metallurgical Institute with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering in Dnepropetrovsk. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, she has been working, with John Freedman, on the translation of Ukrainian plays into English.
 
Director Polly Creed is a theatre director, playwright, and producer. She recently directed Pussycat in Memory of Darkness by Neda Nezhdana as part of the Two Ukrainian Plays double-bill at the Finborough Theatre. The production was the first international show to perform in Kyiv since the outbreak of the War. It later toured to Germany and the USA. Polly previously directed The Straw Chair at the Finborough Theatre. She is a founder of Power Play, a production company that tells women's stories of injustice on stage and on screen. Power Play's debut site-specific showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe 2018 won a Fringe First for Emma Dennis-Edwards’ play, Funeral Flowers. Polly’s directorial debut, Next Time received an ‘Outstanding Show’ accolade at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Polly is also writer of Humane, shortlisted for the Charlie Hartill Award and published by Aurora Metro Books. It has also been adapted into an audio drama. The play version had a stage run at The Pleasance in November 2021. Her play, The Empty Chair, was shortlisted for a Sit Up Award and won Best New Writing at LSDF 2018.  In 2016-2020, she ran a successful petition and media campaign, calling for Harvey Weinstein to be stripped of his honorary CBE. Polly is currently producing a feature documentary exploring the legacy of Holloway Prison.
 

Performer Emma D’Inverno returns to the Finborough Theatre where she has appeared in Child of the Forest and Mr Gillie. Trained at Drama Centre London.
Theatre includes Philistines, Mephisto, Troilus and Cressida and The Danton Affair (Royal Shakespeare Company), The Pilgrim (Sadler’s Wells and International Tour), Situation Vacant and The Women of Lockerbie (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond), The Last Supper (Royal Court Theatre and National Tour), Bread and Butter (Southwark Playhouse and National Tour), Three Sisters (Birmingham Rep), Uncle Vanya (Bridge Theatre, Huddersfield), What Every Woman Knows and A Chorus of Disapproval (New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich), East Lynne (Redgrave Theatre, Bristol) and Perfect Days (Coliseum Theatre, Oldham).

Television includes The Houseman's Tale, Making News, Taggart, Drowning in the Shallow End, Rebus, Legit, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Apple Tree House. Film includes After Life, The Blood Hunt and The Raggedy Rawney. Radio includes The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, The Butterfly Cabinet and A Voyage of Sighs. Emma spent three years in the rep company of the BBC World Service and has worked extensively in ADR. She has co-produced three short contemporary films of Shakespeare’s sonnets with Tracey Childs, Jane Bertish, Lyndsey Duncan, Zoe Wanamaker, Kenneth Cranham, Nigel Lambert and the late Alan Rickman. Emma also works as the training co-ordinator for the charity Interact Stroke Support which provides live readings to stroke patients by professional actors.
 
Available from Thursday, 31 August 2023 at 9.00am.