London

I first performed Pussycat in Memory of Darkness (dir Polly Creed) at the Finborough Theatre in August 2022, as part of a double bill with Natalka Vorobits' play Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha.  I was asked back in March '23 for a further run of three weeks.  A year later, in July '24, after opening the brand-new Festival for Ukraine with Inna Goncharova's play, The Trumpeter, in Wiesbaden, Germany, director Vladimir Shcherban, translator John Farndon and I brought it to the Finborough for a month's run, together with a very successful series of after-show events, performed largely by Ukrainian actors and writers.

The play takes place during the siege of Mariupol in 2022 and tells the story of the soldiers who have taken refuge in the honeycomb of underground basements in the Azovstal Steelworks.  It centres on an unnamed trumpeter with the Azov Brigade, hiding in one of the basements with four companions (unseen by the audience), living in a state of almost complete darkness and under almost constant bombardment.  But although the play is about war, it's as much about love and the role of friendship as it is about war - and above all, about the power of music to affect the human spirit.