Cast Set For UKRAINE UNBROKEN at the Arcola Theatre

Ukraine Unbroken will have an ensemble cast featuring Daniel Betts (To Kill A Mockingbird), Ian Bonar (Retrograde), Clare Holman (Who's Afraid Of Virginia Wolf – Olivier Award Nominated), David Michaels (The 39 Steps), Clara Read (Matilda The Musical), and Jade Williams (The Father) all of whom play a variety of roles in each of the five plays. Performances run 26 February – 26 March 2026.

Ukraine Unbroken is conceived by the producer-director of the Olivier Award-nominated The Great Game – Afghanistan Nicolas Kent and charts twelve turbulent years of modern Ukrainian history from the Maidan protests of 2014 to Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 and beyond. Across five gripping plays by some of today's most acclaimed British and Ukrainian writers, including David Edgar, David Greig and Natalka Vorozhbit, audiences will explore the resilience of a nation determined to remain free.

Performed with live Ukrainian music from Mariia Petrovska on the bandura and woven through with headlines and voices from the front line, Ukraine Unbroken is a portrait of resistance and strength in a powerful cycle of short plays about courage, truth and survival in the face of tyranny.

THE PLAYS

ACT 1: DEMONSTRATIONS & INVASIONS

ALWAYS – JONATHAN MYERSON

• In Always by Jonathan Myerson (BBC's Nuremberg: The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals) a married couple is held hostage inside Hotel Ukraina in 2014 as their son protests in Maidan Square below.

FIVE DAY WAR – DAVID EDGAR

• David Edgar (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; Destiny) takes a darkly comic and sinister look at the ambition and delusion of Russia's 2022 “Special Military Operation” – an invasion that was not an invasion and a war that was not a war.

ACT 2: WAR

THREE MATES – NATALKA VOROZHBIT

• Natalka Vorozhbit (Bad Roads, trans. Sasha Dugdale) explores the shame of survival in Three Mates, translated by Sasha Dugdale - a darkly humorous confession from a Ukrainian man in hiding from conscription, reflecting on the different paths through the war he and his friends have taken.

WRETCHED THINGS – DAVID GREIG

• David Greig's (Dunsinane; The Events) Wretched Things tells a story of Ukrainian front-line troops who have captured a wounded North Korean soldier and must decide whether to risk their own lives to save his.

• Cat Goscovitch (A Russian Doll) confronts the harrowing reality of the 20,000 Ukrainian children stolen by Russia in Taken, which follows one mother's search for her daughter through a world of propaganda and re-education, where both childhood and country are erased.