With no idea how they got there or how they will get out – or even if they want to.
Based on true stories of horrors inflicted on women in the war in Ukraine, Closed Sky is Ukrainian playwright Neda Nejdana’s remarkable and ultimately uplifting response to the Russian airstrike on the Mariupol theatre which killed 600 people, written in Summer 2022 — within 7 weeks of the atrocity.
John Farndon is an author, translator and poet. Joint winner of the European Bank Literary Prize 2019 for the translation of Uzbek Hamid Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance, and Finalist for the US PEN Translation Award 2020 for Kazakh Rollan Seisenbayev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert. Since the full scale Russian invation, he’s translated 25 Ukrainian plays for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Reading Project, including Nezhdana’s Pussycat in Memory of Darkness.
Neda Nezhdana is one of Ukraine’s leading playwrights, theatremakers, poets and translators. She is the author of more than two dozen original plays, as well as several adaptations and two collections of poetry. Born in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, she lives in Kyiv. She leads the department of dramatic projects in Les Kurbas National Centre for Theatre Arts, and is Chairman of the Confederation of Playwrights of Ukraine. Her plays are now being performed in cities across Ukraine and Europe. The London production of her Pussycat in Memory of Darkness (Finborough, 2022-23) received glowing reviews and was a finalist for Offies Best New Play 2022.