Home. Online Premiere

On November 17, 2020, the online premiere of the stage performance Home based on the play of the same name by the British playwright Nicola McCartney took place. This project is a collaborative work of the TRANSLATORIUM Literary and Translation Festival and the Kyiv Academic Theater of Drama and Comedy on the left bank of Dnipro, in particular the main director of the theater, Tamara Trunova. The project was supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation. The performance was broadcast with the support of the OpenTheatre platform.

Nicola McCartney’s play Home was translated by Hanna Kyriienko, Oleksandra Vankevych, Olha Kovaliova, and Tetiana Savchynska in April 2019 as part of the TRANSLATORIUM Translation Residency held in partnership with the Khmelnytskyi Development Agency with the support of the Culture Bridges program. The residency ended with a staged reading of the translation of the play at the Mykhailo Starytskyi Academic Music and Drama Theater in Khmelnytskyi with the participation of the theater actresses, directed by Dmytro Husakov. In addition, in June 2019, another reading took place within the framework of the International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv with the participation of the translators of the play. The translation of the play became an important, interesting and completely new stage of the work of the TRANSLATORIUM festival. The more the festival team immersed themselves in the text, the more difficult it was to stop at what was done and not plan the future life of the completed translation. Therefore, after the readings, the search for opportunities to implement the Ukrainian translation of the play in the form of a performance on the stage of the theater began.

Home is a rather specific work. It is built on conversations between four extremely different women who are related to each other: the dialogues touch on the past, which is full of resentments and unresolved confusing questions, because of which the present, in which the characters live, is completely promiscuous, somewhat listless, and despairing. This is a dense text with many memories, with interruptions, and with unusual comments of the character, who has a communication disorder, and all this sounds in one small room. For directing, the task is not easy at all. By a happy coincidence, it was at this time that our paths crossed with Tamara Trunova, a theater director, the main director of the Kyiv Academic Theater of Drama and Comedy on the left bank of Dnipro, who was interested in the play and cooperation with the TRANSLATORIUM festival on the upcoming performance. It is important for Tamara Trunova to work with female roles in the theater, and in the play there were 4 female characters of different ages. In particular, the director’s approach was based on the psychological knowledge of individual traumatic experience, which was revealed during the work on the text, and in the case of Home it was a study of family relationships and the possibilities of human interaction in general, traumatic relationships that are experienced by everyone.

Putting the play on stage at the suggestion of translators is a rather unpopular practice, even unlikely. In general, the theater community does not interact too closely with the translation or literary community, so there are almost no such projects where the theater director collaborates with the translators of the play and shares the work on creating the performance. Additional difficulties are caused by the name of the Scottish playwright who is completely unknown in Ukraine, and who is an outstanding representative of contemporary British drama. However, it is extremely interesting to do something for the first time, especially if a brave team has been formed for it. Therefore, having united their interests, the TRANSLATORIUM Festival and director Tamara Trunova took part in a competition from the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and obtained grant support for the creation and showing of the stage performance Home based on the play by Nicola McCartney within the framework of the IV TRANSLATORIUM Literary and Translation Festival. The theme of the festival in 2020—Form—explored one of the fundamental questions faced by the spheres of literary studies and translation, in particular, significant attention was paid to the transformation of form and the transition of one form of art to another, that is why the showing of Home was planned as a central event, illustrating translation in the broadest sense—from the plane of the written text to the plane of theatrical performative art.

However, the planned form of the performance underwent changes due to the pandemic and the quarantine regime, which greatly affected the work of the cultural sector, as a result of which many events were postponed and the activities of institutions were restricted. Guided by the main issue of 2020, health safety, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation decided to support only those projects that were ready to go online. So this challenge was accepted and the project was transformed into the Online Premiere of Home, continuing work with the theme of form. From the beginning, the performance Home was planned for a small hall of the theater, but broadcasting the performance online just solved the issue of a small number of viewers, and in this case the limitation worked on the contrary as an opportunity to attract a much larger audience, which is also a very important aspect for the wider familiarization of Ukrainian audiences with British drama in the Ukrainian sense.

The project team felt even more confident after partnering with the OpenTheatre platform—the only team in Ukraine professionally engaged in the distribution of contemporary Ukrainian theater in an online format, it was they who agreed to broadcast the performance Home.

So, the gradual preparation of the performance itself began. In July 2020, the casting of actresses for the online premiere of Home took place. 98 actresses from different cities of Ukraine applied for participating in the performance, and 24 actresses were invited to the second round of casting. It was not easy for the director Tamara Trunova to decide who would make up the acting quartet of this project, but soon the decision appeared organically and Svitlana Orlichenko, Iryna Mak, Maryna Klimova, and Nataliia Kobizka got the roles of Kat, Annie, Joe, and Jen. Subsequently, an intensive rehearsal period began for the actresses and the director: they got to know the characters, discussed the text of the play, interpreted the views and actions of the characters, and the actresses learned to feel their roles.

Nicola McCartney’s play is also peculiar for its frequent references to popular American and Scottish songs of the 1970s, through which the characters say something personal and painful, which is not spoken in words. Here, Tamara Trunova made a bold artistic decision and, based on poetic translations of song texts, made the musical part of the performance, which was represented by the fifth character, whose role was performed by Iryna Lazer, composer, singer, and member of the Mavka band.

The work with music in this performance is very closely intertwined with intersemiotic translation and interpretation, since the task was to create expressive songs with which the audience would be familiar and immediately grasp the meanings embedded in them, that is, it is not about translating one culture into another, but about transferring hint and impression similar to the original.

Delving into the dialogues of the characters and their multilayeredness, Tamara Trunova departs from the mundanity depicted in the text of the play and focuses on the elusive messages echoing between the lines of the characters’ lines, thus the director defines the genre of the play as a ‘collective dream’, emphasizing the absurdity that often appears in the attempts of very different people to understand each other, at the same time talking about barely perceptible threads of connection between people who, living their automatic life, are either half asleep or half awake.

Another intrigue of the project was the collaboration of the director Tamara Trunova with the artist Vlad Odudenko, who developed the visual design of the stage for the performance. Vlad Odudenko is known as the production designer of several successful Ukrainian films, his return to the theater environment was very welcome for the theater community, and his participation in the preparation of the performance Home clearly had a bright original manifestation.

During the final stage of work in September 2020, the Kyiv Academic Theater of Drama and Comedy on the left bank of Dnipro was sent to a three-week quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, the online premiere was postponed to October 30, and then, due to outbreaks of the disease, to November 17. Of course, the ‘turbulence’ of 2020 is understandable, but it is the online format that makes it possible to make changes to the dates without losing the audience. On the contrary, during that time, the Home performance became so expected and desired that more than 500 viewers registered to watch the broadcast. A premiere with such a ‘sold-out’ notice is definitely considered a success, even if it is an online premiere, and in this case, it is also a landmark event that introduces the Ukrainian theater scene to the playwright Nicola McCartney for the first time, brings together so many specialists from the fields of theater, literature, and translation in a collaborative work, for the first time a play that was translated collectively during the residency goes such a long way and turns into a bold performance. As its director Tamara Trunova said, “we take small steps”. It is from successive small and constant steps that such interdisciplinary projects are made, which bring curiosity, inspiration, and thanks to which unique and bright works are created.