Voices from Ukraine: Two Plays: NHB Modern Plays

Neda Nezhdana is one of Ukraine's leading playwrights, theatremakers, poets and translators. She is the author of more than two dozen original plays, including The Suicide of Loneliness and When the Rain Returns, as well as several adaptations and two collections of poetry. Born in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, she lives in Kyiv. She has led the department of dramatic projects in Les Kurbas National Centre for Theatre Arts for fifteen years, founded the Kyiv independent theatre MIST and is Chairman of the Confederation of Playwrights of Ukraine. Her plays such as Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, He Opens the Door, and Lost In the Fog have become potent symbols of Ukraine's battle for independent existence. One of her most celebrated plays is the culture-defining semi-documentary drama Maidan Inferno about the pivotal events of the Maidan of 2014. It has been performed in France as well as across Ukraine. Her work has been seen in most cities in Ukraine, and in Belarus, Poland, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Croatia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, Estonia, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, France, Turkey, Portugal, Austria, Sweden, the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Australia and Iraq. Her play Ovetka@ua received its wartime premieres in Uzhhorod and Poltava in 2022, while The Closed Sky is an epic drama based on four women's true stories from the Russian attacks on Mariupol in spring 2022.
Natal'ya Vorozhbit (aka Natal'ia Vorozhbyt) is a Ukrainian playwright and a leader in the resurgence of Ukrainian national drama in the 21st century. She writes in both Ukrainian and Russian. Her first major play, Galka Motalko, had success shortly after she graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute (Moscow) in 2000. The Grain Store, a historical work about the Holodomor, the state-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2009. Vorozhbit took part in the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013 and 2014, and the theme of the ensuing war with Russia has coloured her work since. In 2015 she co-founded the Theater of Displaced People with Georg Genoux, offering an opportunity for refugees from the Donbass region to tell their stories in a formal, theatrical context. Her other plays include Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha, which received its UK premiere as part of A Play, A Pie and A Pint: International Plays from Ukraine and Russia at Òran Mór, Glasgow, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2015; and Bad Roads (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2017). Bad Roads was made into a film directed by the author, which was Ukraine's official Oscar selection in 2022. Vorozhbit also wrote the screenplay for Cyborgs (2017), a film about the defence of an airport in Donetsk where Ukrainian soldiers fought separatists for 242 days.