Producing Ukrainian Plays Internationally

The Finborough Theatre’s new digital initiative #FinboroughFrontier #VoicesFromUkraine continues with a discussion on Producing Ukrainian Plays Internationally, in conjunction with Two Ukrainian Plays, a double bill, which recently played live at the Finborough Theatre. The discussion features director Svetlana Dimcovic, John Freedman, and the cast of Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha; Alan Cox, Amanda Ryan and Issy Knowles. 

Director Svetlana Dimcovic (Director, Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha) trained at the University of Birmingham, the National Theatre Studio, the Orange Tree Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is the Artistic Director of Merchant Culture, Connecting Art with Digital Innovation. She was Associate Director at the Bush Theatre, Baltic and Eastern European Programme (2009-2010), Associate Director of the Gate Theatre (2003-2005), Associate Director of the Caird Company (2002-2005) and a Trainee Director at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond (2001-2002). Her new writing work includes workshops for young playwrights and numerous translations for: Royal Court Theatre; Royal Shakespeare Company; BBC Radio; West Yorkshire Playhouse; Caird Company; Sterijino Pozorje Festival, Belgrade; Belgrade International Theatre Festival; Atelje 212, Belgrade; and Martovski Film Festival, Belgrade. Previous productions at the Finborough Theatre includes The Potting Shed by Graham Greene. Previous productions include Absent (Migrants in Theatre, The Young Vic), In the Bear’s Jaws (Merchant Culture, Belgrade International Theatre Festival), And the Band Keeps Marching On (Barbican Theatre, Bush Theatre and Sage Gateshead for Sky Arts), F****ed.com (Merchant Culture, Traverse Theatre), Swimming Pool (Avignon Theatre Festival), Belfast Girls (National Famine Commemoration, Drogheda Arts Centre, Ireland), The Truth Teller (Kings Head Theatre), The Entertainer (Riverside Studios), Sorry (Theatre in the Mill, Bradford), Belfast Girls (National Theatre Studio, London), Memory Play (Tiata Fahodzi, Africa Centre), Mr Punch (Swan Theatre, Worcester), Belfast Girls (Kings Head Theatre), Oasis (Scene Nationale de la Guadeloupe), Nine Night and 45 Minutes from Here (Bush Theatre, Square Chapel Halifax and Theatre in the Mill, Bradford), The God of Hell (Belgrade, Serbia), The Outside (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond), Lithuanian Festival (Southwark Playhouse), Zuva Crumbling (Lyric Hammersmith), The Professional (Citizens Theatre, Glasgow), Mushroom Pickers (Southwark Playhouse), Writer’s Generation (Arts Printing House, Vilnius, Lithuania), The Broken Heel (Riverside Studios) and A Kind of Alaska (Orange Tree Theatre).

John Freedman is an American writer and translator who, after working 30 years in Russia, now lives in Greece. He lived in Moscow from 1988 to 2018, where he was the theatre critic of The Moscow Times (1992-2015). His play Dancing, Not Dead (2011) was winner of the Internationalists Global Play Contest (2011); his short play Five Funny Tales from the Heart of Buenos Aires (2013) has been performed in NY, Chattanooga, and Edinburgh. He has translated over 100 plays, of which productions have been mounted in five continents. He is the author of numerous books, including Silence’s Roar: The Life and Drama of Nikolai Erdman (1992), and Provoking Theater: Kama Ginkas Directs (2003). He is the curator of two Worldwide Play Readings projects: Insulted. Belarus (2020 to present) and Ukrainian Play Readings (2022). https://jfreed16.wixsite.com/johnfreedman

And the cast of Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha:

Alan Cox 
Productions at the Finborough Theatre include But It Still Goes On, Cornelius (which subsequently transferred to 59E59 Theaters, New York), Chu Chin Chow, and Atman as part of Vibrant – An Anniversary Festival of Finborough Playwrights 2010. 
Trained at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Theatre includes Uncle Vanya (Hampstead Theatre), Hamlet (Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington), The Divided Laing (Arcola Theatre), City Stories (St James Studio), Kingmaker (Arts Theatre), Playing with Grown Ups (Brits off Broadway), Longing (Hampstead Theatre), The Caretaker (Adelaide Festival and US Tour), The Tempest (Jericho House), Blok/Eko, Hurts Given and Received, Found in the Ground and The Fence (The Wrestling School), Behind the Eye (Cincinnati Playhouse), 50 Hour Improvathon (Hoxton Hall), Much Ado About Nothing (Chester Performs), Orwell: A Celebration (Trafalgar Studios), Frost/Nixon (US Tour), Natural Selection (Theatre503), Passion Play (Goodman Theatre, Chicago), Translations (Manhattan Theatre Club), The Creeper (Playhouse Theatre), The Rubenstein Kiss (Hampstead Theatre), The Earthly Paradise (Almeida Theatre), John Bull’s Other Island (Lyric Theatre, Belfast), The Flu Season (Gate Theatre), The Importance of Being Earnest (Theatre Royal Haymarket), The Duchess of Malfi (Salisbury Playhouse), Three Sisters (Birmingham Rep), An Enemy Of The People, Wild Oats, Absolute Hell and The Seagull (National Theatre), The Lady’s Not for Burning and On The Razzle (Chichester Festival Theatre), Strange Interlude (Duke of York’s Theatre) and several productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is a regular improviser with Ken Campbell’s School of Night.
Film includes Magic Mike’s Last Dance, The Speed of Thought, Not Only But Always, Act Naturally, Ladies in Lavender, The Waterfalls of Slunj, Cor Blimey, The Auteur Theory, Contagion, Mrs. Dalloway, An Awfully Big Adventure and Young Sherlock Holmes.
Television includes New Amsterdam, The Good Wife, Lucan, A Voyage Around My Father, The Odyssey, Housewife 49, John Adams and Margaret.

Issy Knowles
Trained at the Actors Temple and the National Youth Theatre.
Theatre includes writing and acting in her own one woman show, Model Behaviour (Edinburgh Festival, Arcola Theatre and Pleasance London). 
Film includes Chasing Ghosts.
Television includes currently developing Model Behaviour as a six-part series with production company Carnival Films.

Amanda Ryan
Trained at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Theatre includes Beginning (Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre, York and Lunchbox Theatre), Shadowlands (Birdsong Productions), Blue Moon (Fat Git Theatre), The Herbal Bed (Theatr Clwyd), Betrayal (Theatre Royal, York), The Memory Of Water (New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough), The Astronaut’s Chair (Drum Theatre, Plymouth), Notes To Future Self (Birmingham Rep and National Tour), Otherwise Engaged (Criterion Theatre), A Streetcar Named Desire (Theatr Clwyd), Close (National Theatre and International Tour) and The Wood Demon (Playhouse Theatre).
Film includes Anti-Social, Love Eternal, Sparkle, Red Mercury, Stealing Lives, Britannic, The Escort/Mauvaise Passe, Elizabeth I, The Man Who Held His Breath, Metroland, Woodlanders and Jude.
Television includes This is Going to Hurt, Casualty, Free Rein, Doctors, Coronation Street, Suspects, Lewis, Midsomer Murders, Shameless, EastEnders, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, Christmas Merry, M.I.T., Murphy’s Law, The Forsyte Saga, Real Men, Dalziel and Pascoe, A Great Deliverance, Attachments, David Copperfield, Kavanagh QC: Previous Convictions, Supply and Demand, The Hunger, Inspector Morse, The New Adventures Of Robin Hood, Wycliffe and Poldark.
Audio includes The Marlowe Sessions.
Radio includes Notes To Future Self and The Last Of The Debutantes. 

Available FREE TO VIEW on the Finborough Theatre YouTube channel #FinboroughFrontier. 

All videos are free to view but we do ask for donations for https://voices.org.ua/en/donat/ 

Available from Saturday, 3 September at 9.00am 

#FINBOROUGHFRONTIER
During lockdown, our acclaimed #FinboroughForFree series released monthly free-to-view archive recordings and original online content including new plays, rediscoveries, a community festival, and the Finborough Forum, our invitation-only group for theatre creatives. Our online work saw us awarded London Pub Theatres’ Award for Pub Theatre of the Year 2020, and our web series Late Night Staring At High Res Pixels won London Pub Theatres Standing Ovation Award for Best Online Theatre 2021.
We strongly believe that online work is an exciting new complement to our work, and are anxious to explore this new medium, embracing anything that can be presented digitally including film, livestream, audio, and hybrid. We are especially keen to develop digital work to increase our international engagement, and also to ensure that our work is truly available for everyone, especially those who cannot easily access our auditorium.
Since January 2022, we have continued our online work under a brand new name – #FinboroughFrontier, curated by Artistic Director Neil McPherson and Playwright-in-Residence Athena Stevens. All our online content will remain – as it was throughout lockdown – entirely free to view, and also be available in a subtitled version. Our first releases, earlier this year, were An Earls Court Miscellany, a celebration of the vivid history and personalities of Earl’s Court featuring poetry, prose and music, and filmed in the local area, and How To Make A Revolution by Einat Weizman with Issa Amro, a verbatim documentary play filmed in the UK and Hebron.

#VoicesFromUkraine #Українськіголоси #Ukrayinsʹkiholosy
Previous releases in the #VoicesFromUkraine #Українськіголоси #Ukrayinsʹkiholosy include Otvetka by Neda Nezhdana, The Peed-Upon Armored Personnel Carrier by Oksana Gritsenko, A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War by Yelena Astasyeva, accompanied by poems by Tatiana Voltskaya, a Russian poet condemning her country’s war against Ukraine, and director Polly Creed interviewing Tetyana Filevska and Karina Sabri. All are now available on the Finborough Theatre YouTube channel, and available with subtitles on Scenesaver.

Live productions include Two Ukrainian Plays featuring Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha in a double bill with Neda Nezhdana’s monologue Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, pairing Ukraine’s leading contemporary playwright together with a Ukrainian playwright making her UK debut, playing at the Finborough Theatre until 3 September 2022.