As the play begins, actor Kristin Milward unwraps a skein of bandages to reveal a squat black notebook. “This is the symphony of war,” she tells us. The notebook contains a musical score attempting the impossible task of capturing the cruel attack on Ukraine in melody. Milward plays a trumpeter, the sole survivor of a military band, huddling from Russian bombardment below the steelworks of Mariupol in 2022.
The siege of the steelworks took place early in the invasion of Ukraine. Civilians and military sheltered in the basement of the Azovstal steelworks for 80 days, enduring extremes of hunger, fear and injury. For much of the time, communications were cut off – reports of the terrible conditions only gradually emerged.
This production continues the Finborough’s Voices from Ukraine strand of live and virtual work which began almost immediately after the invasion. In Inna Goncharova’s 60-minute play, translated by John Farndon, the trumpeter-composer struggles to locate harmony in the conflict’s cruel cacophony. How can you draw music from the mortars? “It sounded completely different in my head,” Milward laments.
Vladimir Shcherban’s production and the lighting design by Hakan Hafizoglu emphasise sudden flurries of mood, perhaps too abruptly. Confined on the tight Finborough stage, Milward recalls the springtime scents of lilac and jasmine, gesturing “up there” to life on the surface as if to an impossible height.
Milward rattles with vitality, stretching an incongruous smile despite the circumstances. We don’t hear the composer’s music but Milward performs a vocal symphony: smoke-voiced anxiety, bellows of bombardment, a voice worn to a wisp by fear – and the rasp of breath in the darkness that means survival. The trumpeter hopes their composition will provide “an insight into the nature of war – its essence”. That may be an impossible ambition, but Goncharova asserts the continued urge to human creativity, however bleak the context.
• At the Finborough, London, until 3 August
