PLANET SPERANTA Comes to the Finborough Theatre

The Finborough Theatre's new digital initiative #FinboroughFrontier continues with a unique rediscovery from Ukraine - an online premiere reading from leading Soviet-Ukrainian playwright Oleksii Kolomiiets, written in 1965, premiering FREE-TO-VIEW on the Finborough YouTube channel on Monday, 12 September at 6.00pm, and concurrently with subtitles on Scenesaver.

World War Two. The Eastern Front. Five Soviet soldiers - whose names they are forbidden to share even with each other - sit in a bunker, waiting, as artillery fires overhead...

Resigned to their bleak fate, they begin to share stories of past love and their dreams for a brighter future.

Twenty years later, on the same spot, a group of students gather to discuss their lives in Soviet Ukraine, as they wait for their futures to begin.

Planet Speranta explores sacrifice, friendship, and what it means to hope for a better life for the next generation.

Playwright Oleksii Kolomiiets (1919-1994) was a leading Soviet Ukrainian dramatist of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He was born in Kharkivisi, now in Lokhvytsia Raion in Poltava Oblast. After the Second World War, he worked for several years as a Komsomol functionary and a magazine and newspaper editor until 1960. Kolomiiets began publishing short stories in various periodicals in 1953, and in 1960, his first collection, Bila krynytsia (The White Well), appeared. He also began writing plays, His first play, Faraony (The Pharaohs, 1961), was performed in theatres in Ukraine and in Russia. It was a major theatrical success - in the 1965-66 season alone, it was seen on stage by a quarter of a million people and was also shown on Soviet television. The play was also translated into numerous languages of the USSR and satellite countries. After the success of Faraony, Kolomiiets devoted himself solely to playwriting and wrote twenty plays including Spasyb/ (labi, moie kokhannia (Thank You, My Love 1966), Holubi oleni (Azure Deer, 1973), Sribnu juivulyna (The Silver Spiderweb, 1977), Dykyi anhel (Wild Angel, 1978), and Hrad kniaela Kyia (the City of Prince Kyi, 1981). He received several literary awards, including the Ukrainian SSR State Prize (1977) and the Korniichuk Prize (1986).

Translator Bohdan Boychuk was born in 1927 in the village of Bortnyky, Buchach county, Galicia. He was a poet, cofounder and member of the New York Group, writer, literary critic, and translator. He was also a foreign slave worker in Nazi Germany, and a postwar refugee, living in displaced persons camps in Germany until 1949, when he immigrated to the United States and settled in New York. An active member of the Ukrainian émigré cultural community, he was cofounder and coeditor of the New York Group's serial publication Novi poeziï and the main organizer of the group's publishing house. He was also an editor of literature (between 1961 and 1973) of the journal Suchasnist, and a cofounder and coeditor of the literary journal Svito-vyd in Kyiv (1990-99). Boychuk's published modernist poetry, strongly influenced by the philosophy of Existentialism, includes Chas boliu (The Time of Pain, 1957), the long poem Zemlia bula pustoshnia (The Earth Was a Wasteland, 1959), Spomyny liubovy (Memories of Love, 1963), Virshi dlia Mekhiko (Poems for Mexico, 1964), Mandrivka til (The Journey of Bodies, 1967), Podorozh z uchytelem (Travels with the Teacher, 1976), Virshi, vybrani i peredostanni (Poems, Selected and Next to the Last, 1983), Tretia osin' (Third Autumn, 1991), and Kyivs'ki ekslibrysy (Kyiv Ex-Librises, 2006). A two volume edition of his selected poetry was published in Kyiv in 2007. His prose works include Dvi zhinky Al'berta (Albert's Two Women, 2002), Try romany (Three Novels, 2004), Nad sakral'nym ozerom (At the Sacred Lake, 2006), and Moï feministky (My Feminists, 2011). He is also the author of Dvi dramy (Two Dramas, 1968) and a memoir Spomyny v biohrafiï (Memoirs within a Biography, 2003). He also edited several anthologies and books of Ukrainian poetry. He died on 10 February 2017 in Kyiv.

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