Join us for a reading (in English) of excerpts from two new documentary plays by leading Ukrainian playwrights Anastasiia Kosodii and Kateryna Penkova.

Commissioned by Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Birkbeck’s Institute for Gender and Sexuality, these texts exemplify the remarkable culture of defiance and resistance in Ukrainian political playwriting and demonstrate how theatre-makers are using their craft to speak out against the atrocities of Russia’s ongoing war.

In the eight years between the start of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine witnessed an impressive boom in socially engaged theatre and political playwriting. These recent documentary plays by Anastasiia Kosodii and Kateryna Penkova exemplify the remarkable culture of defiance and resistance in Ukrainian political playwriting and demonstrate how theatre-makers are using their craft to speak out against the atrocities of Russia’s ongoing war.

These readings will be followed by a discussion with the playwrights together with Ukrainian theatre specialist, Molly Flynn (Birkbeck).

Readings include:

Narrating the War by Anastasiia Kosodii (Kyiv/Zaporizhzhia/Berlin)

A Marathon of Russian Roulette by Kateryna Penkova (Kyiv/Donetsk/Warsaw)

Both texts translated by Helena Kernan.