Nicolas Kent’s Ukraine Unbroken takes to the Arcola to explore war‑torn Ukraine through five short plays. Never one to shy away from complex political themes, Kent’s production looks at different aspects of the Ukraine war, from the political maelstrom in the lead‑up to invasion to life as a soldier and life as a civilian under Russian attack. The format follows Kent’s earlier work, The Great Game – Afghanistan, which looked at the history of Afghanistan through half‑hour plays. Five writers, Jonathan Myerson, David Edgar, Natalka Vorozhbyt, David Greig and Cat Goscovitch, come together in this tense collaboration to give a realistic and engaging look at life on the Eastern Front.
Ukraine Unbroken is an engaging piece of theatre as well as a powerful piece of political commentary. Even in the jargon‑heavy Five Day War, Kent does a good job of keeping the audience hooked. Each play feels unique. The shocking violence of Wretched Things contrasts beautifully with the playful humour peppered into Three Mates. Wretched Things feels the most parabolic, Taken the most realistic (horrifically so).
Many of the cast are familiar faces in Kent’s work. Daniel Betts first appears in Ukraine Unbroken as a thuggish FSB agent, a far cry from the heroic fire chief Betts played in Kent’s Grenfell: Value Engineering. In both plays, Betts’ performance is excellent. Jade Williams, Sally Giles and Clara Read do a great job of bringing the feminine perspective into an evening that could have, like many depictions of war, focused solely on the men. Williams and Read’s performance as mother and daughter in the final play is particularly striking. Ian Bonar demonstrates excellent versatility throughout, and David Michaels delivers in a similar fashion.
The plays are staggered by a recording of Mariia Petrovska, a performing musician with the Ukrainian Cultural Forces, who talks about life in Ukraine while playing a bandura and singing various pieces of traditional music, including a song by Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko.
Depicting Russian and Ukrainian characters with distinct cultural and linguistic nuances, while all speaking English, is handled well. In Always, the first play, the Kyiv characters sound like they are from London, while the Donbas/Crimean Ukrainians have northern accents. Throughout the production, the Russian characters are careful to pronounce “Lviv”, “Kyiv” and other words with Russian pronunciation, not Ukrainian. Like the simple Eastern Bloc set designs or the addition of army patches on the soldiers’ uniforms, this adds a touch of authenticity to the production, helping the audience become immersed.
The production looks at draft‑dodging, national identity, stolen children and the Geneva Convention, this last point feeling especially poignant on the day the American Secretary of Defense mocked “politically correct wars” and described the military rules of engagement as “stupid”.
On the whole, an excellent piece of theatre. Ukraine Unbroken will run for just over a month from 27 February to 28 March at the Arcola Theatre.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
