The Trumpeter by Inna Goncharova. The Finborough Theatre. 118 Finborough Road, London until 03 August 2024.

3✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“Surviving in Mariupol.”

There are times when having to award stars is really difficult. This account of the siege of Mariupol om the spring of 2022 has been turned into a one person play by Inna Goncharova and is part of the Voices from Ukraine season the Finborough is currently running. For various reasons I had not seen any of the earlier pieces and, while I had read Brian Cox’s praise for Kristin Milward in Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, had really no idea what to expect of this piece in which she also appears. One forgets – Mariupol’s fate was hot news in 2022 but other crises have arisen since in Ukraine, and there is the notorious short interest span the British media has in events overseas. Other bloody events – those for instance in Gaza - take precedence for a while until something elsewhere takes centre stage. The problem is coming cold to something likeThe Trumpeter is tricky as it takes a little while to realise just what Milward is up to and why. She is the Trumpeter, an army band member trapped with others – a soldier, a nurse, a lawyer - in the city’s steel works under constant bombardment by the Russians. There are four chairs, four jackets hanging on their backs, and Milward, sometimes wearing one of the jackets, sometimes as the Trumpeter talking to the chair, delivers an impressive and moving performance, although some of what she is required to do is to put it simply really very peculiar indeed. One watches torn between wondering what on earth all that shouting “bang, bang bang” and rushing about changing one’s jacket is for but actually she is creating the hell of being trapped and once one realises that it all starts to work. Solo performances are difficult things to do – there is nobody else to play off - and she certainly succeeds in creating what it must have been like to be there even when at one point the lights all go out and later when surprisingly the stage is flooded with smoke and she becomes invisible. There will be post show discussions and poetry readings on selected evenings during the run - the play lasts an hour, and at most these will last about 40 minutes. Once again the Finborough has come up with a piece of political theatre to make you think about what it is like to have been placed in such a plight far more powerfully than do the TV news reports containing scenes you are warned may be difficult to watch ever do. Forget the star rating, just go.

Cast

Kristin Milward – The Trumpeter.

Creatives

Director – Vladimir Shcherban.

Designers – Vladimir Shcherban & Juliette Demoulin.

Lighting & Sound Designer – Hakan Hafizoglu.