FringeReview UK 2024
The Trumpeter
Stone Wolf Productions in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre in #VoicesFromUkraine
Genre: Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Live Literature, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Poetry-Based Theatre, Political, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre, Translation
Venue: Finborough Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A stage studded with four chairs covered with jackets, a lectern and nothing else; scoured with screams. Kristin Milward twiddles with lint at the lectern and Inna Gonchorova’s The Trumpeter explodes us hundreds of feet under the Azovstal steelworks during the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine in early spring 2022. Directed with set and costume design by Vladimir Shcherban it plays at the Finborough till August 3rd.
Verging on expressionism it’s extraordinary.
Written by Inna Gonchorova, Translated by John Farndon and performed by Kristin Milward, Directed with Set and Costume Design by Vladimir Shcherban, Lighting and Sound Designer Hakan Hafizoglu, Co-Designer Juliette Demoulin
Stage Manager Ross McGregor, DSM Becky Jones
Stone Wolf Productions in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
General Manager Caitlin Carr, Assistant General Managers Jillian Feuerstein and Lydia Free
Till August 3rd
Review
A stage studded with four chairs covered with jackets, a lectern and nothing else; scoured with screams. Kristin Milward twiddles with lint at the lectern and Inna Gonchorova’s The Trumpeter explodes us hundreds of feet under the Azovstal steelworks during the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine in early spring 2022. Translated by John Farndon, and directed with set and costume design by Vladimir Shcherban it plays at the Finborough till August 3rd.
Continuing Finborough’s close engagement with Ukraine, what follows is based on fact: and the play was originally produced in Hesse, Germany in February. Milward herself has been closely involved, giving for instance another memorable solo performance of last year’s Pussycat in Darkness.
Milward’s hour-long performance starts deceptively low-key. Soon she’s throwing herself around the tiny stage, crashing down the chairs with those four jackets doing ragged service as characters. She blows a small horn comically emitting raspberries.
She’s aided sparingly by Hakan Hafizoglu’s lighting and sound, with co-designer Juliette Demoulin adding a spectacular surprise towards the end. But most of the bomb-crumps and screams are emitted by Milward: whether real or triggered PTSD response driving Kolya to distraction, the trauma’s the same. The trumpeter, Milward explains, is composing a Symphony of War.
Milward’s eponymous trumpeter shouldn’t be here. Sole survivor of his unit’s military band and not army-trained he’s fetched up with other defenders. Their core is the far-right nationalist Azov battalion. They’ve had medical supplies and woudne dflown out by two miraculous helicopters. THe Nurse apologises for lack fo supplies. As if she needs to.
So the musician’s even more out of place there than his three companions. These are a silent lawyer (black jacket), two army shirts for a nurse and Kolya, a lieutenant from another battalion too: who fetches up, part-Polish part-Cossack from Crimea, but claiming his family’s Ukraine-dwelling heritage.
All shelter underground. The trumpeter explodes with noises, infuriating Kolya who’s decided to look after him. Eventually the position’s reversed. And Kolya has an eye for the Nurse, tending the wounded lawyer, whilst the Trumpeter’s girlfriend is a star soprano luckily on tour in Italy when the invasion starts.
Indeed why the musician joined the band is a story, like everything else, frayed with the telling. Conservatoire-trained, he’s a composer who couldn’t make his way unlike the rest of his musical family (his grandfather composes film scores).
Kolya declares the Trumpeter is far better as a song-writer than disharmonious symphonist, which no-one wants; whether or not war is discordant. A bond forms: what the Trumpeter values least in himself is what endears him. That and his courageous loyalty.
We know what happened. There’s a timeline. The defenders held out till ordered to surrender by Kiev on May 16th. Nearly all are incarcerated in Russia in appalling conditions.
But something else happened in between, and it’s why we have the witness Gonchorova crafts with economy and skill here. Milward though in a performance one might not have predicted even from her riveting one last year, is key to this. Verging on expressionism it’s extraordinary.
Following this performance, and introduced by the play’s translator John Farndon, there was a rapt 45-minute poetry recital by Kateryna Babkyna, and bandura-player and singer Maria Petrovska. Petrovska topped and tailed the recital with songs, and as an encore Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. In between she accompanied Babkyna’s rapid mellifluous reading of nine remarkable poems on the bandura with remarkable harmonic shifts and subtle quiet modulations, the audience who nearly all stayed were supplied with translations (by other hands).
I’ve heard Slavic poetry read but this was remarkable: Babkyna’s intricate zig-zag sibilance, rattling through the poems carries a charge and music that’s both arresting and paradoxically tranquil. The subject-matter is jagged with soft memories and always ends with a memorial for the first hundred who died in the 2013 protests. There’s a wide range of these events planned through to the end of July.
