The UK focus ‘Transmission.UK’ is a part of the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture, with the support of the British Council, in cooperation with London’s Royal Court Theatre and the Center for Contemporary Theatre of Birkbeck, University in London. The long-term project’s result is the translation of 5 Ukrainian plays into English. These plays were the Drama competition’s winners selected by Ukrainian Institute in 2021.   

Some of the best interpreters worked on translations of modern Ukrainian drama:

• Nina Murray translated two plays: Five Songs of Polissya by Liudmyla Tymoshenko and the opera libretto Penita La Tragedia by Tetiana Kytsenko. The first drama consists of five short stories from 1940 to 2020 in northern Polissya. In the second drama, four women, named after musical instruments, tell us about life in the “sanatorium”. Each has her own story, but they all have something in common that brought them here – murder.  

• Daisy Gibbons translated Pilates Time by Olga Maciupa, where the typical story of one family’s happy day turned into an absurd horror full of violence, retraumatization and pain. 

• The British playwright and interpreter Rory Mullarkey translated the family saga Mother of Gorky by Lena Liahushonkova. In the play, the story about Diyanka unfolds; she lives in a small town on the border with Russia.   

• Helena Kernan translated the comedy-drama Tinderland by Iryna Serebriakova. The story is about three friends looking for love in today’s digital world – they are redefining the roles of women in the modern world and technology’s role in relationships.   

In October 2022, the play Five Songs of Polissya by Liudmyla Tymoshenko became one of the finalists of the Aurora playwriting prize in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and her translation into Polish and English were included in the playwriting collection of the award.   

Also, two currently translated plays — Pilates Time by Olga Maciupa and Mother of Gorky by Lena Liahushonkova — have been selected for the anthology of Ukrainian drama from 2013, which is planned to be published by the British publishing house Bloomsbury in the fall of 2023.