A Fan of War: a new play by Ukrainian playwright Polina Polozhentseva

Polina Polozhentseva is a London-based Ukrainian playwright who used to work in cities such as Kyiv, Dnipro, and Zaporizhzhia. Her play Don’t Flip Out was produced by Wild Theatre (Kyiv, 2022), and her play Grandma and Grandpa Have Sex premiered at the Theatre of Playwrights (Kyiv, 2023). Polina’s play Save the Light has been produced in London, Hong Kong, and Lublin, and was shortlisted for Kent’s Audio Drama Festival. Polina was recently a writer in Residence in the Artists’ Triangle program in Sweden. Her works have been produced and featured in leading Ukrainian theatre festivals in Ukraine and abroad including Kyiv’s PostPlay Theatre, Zaporizhzhia New Drama Theatre, and the Burgtheatre in Vienna.

Anastazie Toros a visual artist and a theatre director currently completing her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts at Loughborough University. Anastazie’s research focuses on applied theatre storytelling in the context of mass migration particularly in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Her directorial work includes a production of Finding a Voice by Samantha Priestley as part of Reboot Festival and Save the Light by Polina Polozhentseva both at London’s Baron’s Court Theatre. Anastazie has presented her research on applied theatre and refugees at leading international conferences and played a key role in working to make applied theatre a core subject in the school curriculum in Lviv (2019–2022).

Oksana Potapova is a theatre maker and researcher who was born and raised in the east of Ukraine. In 2015 she co-founded the NGO Theatre for Dialogue and the women’s initiative One of Us, where she used community theatre and feminist pedagogy to build dialogue and cohesion, and to advocate the rights of internally displaced and other marginalised groups of women at the national and international level. In 2021 she completed a Master’s program in Gender, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics, where she is now continuing her research as a PhD student. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Oksana has continued her research, advocacy, and activism, focusing on highlighting intersectional gendered impacts of this war and building new solidarities around new realities of peace and security in Ukraine and the region.

Molly Flynn is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the editor of the 2023 anthology Ukrainian New Drama After Euromaidan Revolution and author of the 2019 book Witness onstage: Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia. Alongside her work as a teacher and a researcher, Molly is also a producer and curator of socially engaged theatre. Her work includes the Women and War project (2022) which supported the commissioning and translation of two short plays by leading Ukrainian playwrights Kateryna Penkova and Anastasiia Kosodii (December 2022), as well as On the War at the Royal Court Theatre (April 2020), and Depicting Donbas: Creative and critical responses to the war in Ukraine (2019).