Finborough Theatre Presents HE WHO OPENS THE DOOR

The Finborough Theatre's digital initiative #FinboroughFrontier continues with a play from Ukrainian playwright Neda Nezhdana whose Pussycat in Memory of Darkness recently received press acclaim for its live production at the Finborough Theatre including an OffWestEnd nomination for Best New Play. He Who Opens The Door premieres FREE-TO-VIEW on the Finborough YouTube channel on Monday, 28 November at 6.00pm here, and showing concurrently with subtitles on Scenesaver.

Ukraine, the present: two women find themselves trapped in a morgue...

Are they actually dead and being held in limbo...? Or maybe there is a nuclear war or pandemic outside...? Is help on its way? Is someone listening in? Could their escape depend on playing for the right side - pro European or pro Russian. And if the door does open, will it be safe to leave?

A highly topical black comedy, reflecting the limbo for some people in eastern Ukraine, caught between opposing forces.

Playwright Neda Nezhdana is one of Ukraine's leading playwrights, theatremakers, poets and translators, she is the author of more than two dozen original plays, including The Suicide of Loneliness and When the Rain Returns, plus eight adaptations and two collections of poetry. Born in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, she lives in Kyiv. She has led the department of dramatic projects in Les Kurbas National Centre for Theatre Arts for fifteen years, founded the Kyiv independent theatre MIST and is Chairman of the Confederation of Playwrights of Ukraine. Her plays such as Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, He Opens the Door, and Lost In the Fog have become potent symbols of Ukraine's battle for independent existence. One of her most celebrated plays is the culture-defining semi documentary drama Maidan Inferno about the pivotal events of the Maidan of 2014. It has been performed in France as well as across Ukraine. Her work has been seen in most cities in Ukraine, and in Belarus, Poland, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Croatia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, Estonia, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, France, Turkey, Portugal, Austria, Sweden, the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Australia and Iraq. Her play Ovetka@ua received its wartime premieres in Uzhhorod and Poltava in 2022, and is currently available to view for free on the Finborough Theatre's YouTube channel. She has recently completed The Closed Sky, an epic drama based on four women's true stories from the Russian attacks on Mariupol in spring 2022. Her UK live debut Pussycat in Memory of Darkness recently received press acclaim for its production at the Finborough Theatre including an OffWestEnd nomination for Best New Play.

Translator John Farndon is a writer, poet, playwright and songwriter living in London, and a translator of literature from Eurasia, including many plays for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings series. He has written over a thousand books on science, nature and other topics, translated into most languages, and include many international best-sellers. He has been shortlisted five times for the Young People's Science Book Prize. His plays include Anya (Donmar Warehouse), High Risk Zone (Almeida Theatre), The Naked Guest (Pleasance Edinburgh), Lope De Vega's verse play Dog in a Manger (Cockpit Theatre) and an adaptation of Mozart's Il Seraglio (Plymouth Theatre Royal, Salisbury Playhouse and Riverside Studios, London). His translations of the poetry of Lidia Grigorieva were nominated for five major awards, including the Griffin. He was joint winner of the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize for translating the poetry in Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov's The Devil's Dance, and finalist for the 2020 US PEN Translation Award for his translation of Kazakh writer Rollan Seysenbaev's The Dead Wander in the Desert. He has also translated the lyrics of Vladimir Vysotsky. A large bilingual collection of his own poetry is currently being published in Uzbek and English. He ran the Arc venue at the Edinburgh Fringe and also the Cauldron­­­ series of poetry and music events. He was a Royal Literary Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and City and Guilds in London and was chairman of the Eurasian Creative Guild 2019-2021. He is also a judge for New Plays, Most Promising New Playwrights, Production and Performance Pieces for the OffWestEnd Theatre Awards. Recently, his translations of Ukrainian plays have been presented in readings all over the world, including world premieres of two of his translations Polina Pologonceva's Save the Light and Andriy Bondarenko's Fox Dark as Light Night opened recently at Barons Court Theatre in London, and Neda Nezhdana's He Who Opens the Door will open at A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Òran Mór, Glasgow, in August.

Director David Frias-Robles is co-founder of Myriad Entertainment. He is Co-Creator, Writer and Performance Director on Arkham Asylum for Warner Bros. and DC Comics, opening June 2023 in London. Work for Myriad includes Spree (Vault Festival), The Nutcracker Ball (Disney), Proven Innocent (NBC Universal), Flavourology (Gingerline), Le Grand Voyage (Hennessy) and Windows 10 (Microsoft). Other direction includes the critically acclaimed Us (White Bear Theatre), the double Off-West-End award nominated The Friday Freedom Fighters (Etcetera Theatre), Walk of Shame (Cockpit Theatre), Millennial, Take the Train and State of It (Vault Festival), In the Shadow of the Black Dog (Tristan Bates Theatre), Merry and Bright (Delta Collective), September Shakespeare (Pathway Theatre), A Night For Sense UK (The Other Palace), The Wedding Room (Vault Festival), Grimms Tales (UK and International tour) and Canvas City: The End of Prohibition (A secret London location). Assistant Direction includes A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Trafalgar Studios) and Miller's Crossing (Secret Cinema).