Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Mariupol has become synonymous with the war in Ukraine. In Katie Haddad’s new play, Mariupol, the human cost of war is emphasised as Ukrainian Steve and Russian Galina meet up again in the thick of the war after a holiday romance three decades ago.
Review
The war in Ukraine is now into its fourth year. While the toll of the war is great, as the ongoing newsreels on our TV screens every night continue and the numbers of dead are routinely trotted out, it is too easy to become inured to the true costs of war and to forget the individuals whose lives are being torn apart. Katie Haddad’s new play, Mariupol, brings us right up against the human costs of war.
Opening with Galina, a young Russian student, and Steve, an older Ukrainian merchant navy officer meeting at a friend’s wedding in Mariupol, the play spans three decades from 1992 to 2022 as the two characters’ lives intersect over the years. There is an instant attraction between Galina and Steve at the wedding and he invites her to go away for a few days with him to the beach, the Belosarayskaya Sandbank a wildlife reserve on the outskirts of Mariupol, a world away from its industrial heartland. There, they have a magical time but the romance has to end when Galina leaves for Moscow. Their paths cross again in Moscow in a cancer ward in 2002, and finally in 2022 when Galina crosses the border into Ukraine to plead with Steve, now a military officer to save her son now imprisoned in Ukraine.
Nathalie Barclay as Galina and Oliver Gomm as Steve play their parts with sensitivity, ably portraying the lovers’ initial attraction and subsequent shifts in the relationship. The shift between decades as the characters mature is well managed. Hugo Dodsworth’s set, video and lighting design and Robin Collyer’s sound design are simple but effective, well conceived for the small stage. It’s a complex story for the time but Guy Retallack’s surefooted direction ensures the play keeps up its pace throughout.
Mariupol is Russian writer Katie Haddad’s ode to the city of Mariupol, a city which she loved and visited many times in her youth, her last visit being in 1992. Most of us know Mariupol only as a city which was heavily damaged in the early days of the war because of its huge steel works and remains under Russian occupation today. But Haddad remembers a different Mariupol and conjures up a vibrant city with ordinary people living their everyday lives.
There are times when the play tries to do too much within the timespan or when the writing resorts to cliché, but ultimately this is a profoundly moving play which invites us to look behind the headlines at the all too real costs of war for ordinary people caught up in its horror.
