Internationally acclaimed theatre company HUNCHtheatre, together with Pushkin House, proudly present the debut of English-language play 'One Day It Will Happen' by Russian playwright and journalist Tatyana Movshevich. This event will launch HUNCHtheatre’s new season championing new independent theatre voices. After the staged reading there will be a post-show discussion with award-winning BBC presenter Lucy Ash in conversation with Tatyana Movshevich and HUNCHtheatre's co-founding director Vladimir Shcherban.
About the play
Does great art disappear if nobody finds out about it? 'One Day It Will Happen' is an unusual and very personal portrayal of a writer’s life in a small Russian town in which five decades of Soviet past and uncertain future, reality and imagination are interwoven. Presented by debut Russian playwright Tatyana Movshevich and the award-winning HUNCHtheatre. For one night only at Pushkin House on November 17th.
Tatyana Movshevich is a playwright, journalist and human rights defender living in London. She works as a freelance BBC radio presenter and producer and a campaigner at Amnesty International. Through her work she is trying to show complicated changes that are taking place in the post-Soviet region and how injustice affects lives of ordinary people. Her documentaries include ‘Temples of discord: ‘Church building in Putin’s Russia’ (producer) and ‘Young, Cool and Kazakhstani’ (presenter). Having Russian as her mother tongue, Tatyana has recently started writing plays and short stories in English and her work has appeared in Litro Magazine and Gone Lawn journal. Tatyana was born and grew up in an industrial Russian town called Dzerzhinsk which in Soviet times was a centre of chemical production. The play ‘One Day It Will Happen’ is inspired by her experiences there. More broadly, it focuses on the realities of Russian people who live in small towns, create beauty against all odds and very rarely find recognition.
Lucy Ash is an award-winning presenter of radio and TV documentaries. Driven by a passion for justice and human rights, she focuses on characters at the margins of society and conflicts which have dropped out of the headlines. She presents programmes on international theatre, film and visual arts. She speaks fluent Russian and a lot of her work has been inspired by people and events in Russia. Lucy’s work has been described as “unforgettable” and “taken from journalism’s top drawer”. She has won the Sony Gold, Amnesty International, the One World Radio Documentary Award, New York Festivals Radio Award and Radio Story of the Year award from the Foreign Press Association.
HUNCHtheatre was founded in 2018 by Vladimir Shcherban and Oliver Bennett. Their ethos is to act as a bridge between British and European culture – to discover lost masterpieces and fresh new voices. Their first show ‘A Hero of Our Time’ began life in a living room performing to just 10 people, then toured around the world to huge critical acclaim. It was hailed as ‘a vision of what theatre should be’ (The Spectator). They produced the world’s first response to the Novichok poisoning with ‘To See Salisbury’ and presented a new version of Joseph Roth’s ‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ at the VAULT festival 2020. They have a department in Belarus (HUNCHtheatre Belarus) that runs complimentary events. During the pandemic they were the most active company in Europe, performing underground shows, delivery shows outside of London, readings, online events and publishing their first book ‘Still Life’. They are now launching their new season with this reading, followed by the debut of a brand-new show in December. For more information see www.hunchtheatre.org
Vladimir Shcherban
Vladimir graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in 1997, specialising in Drama Direction. From 1997-1999 he worked at the Regional Dramatic Theatre in Mogilev. From 1999 he worked as a director at the Yanka Kupala National Academic Theatre until 2006, when he was dismissed for joining the underground Belarus Free Theatre as its co-founder. He worked at the BFT from 2006-2018 and directed the majority of BFT shows, including 4.48 Psychosis, Being Harold Pinter, Minsk 2011, Zone of Silence, New York '79, King Lear, Price of Money and Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion. These shows have toured internationally to huge critical acclaim. Vladimir’s shows have won a Fringe First at Edinburgh Fringe, an Obie Award and been nominated for a Drama Desk Award in New York. He is also a co-founder of Laboratory Fortinbras, an underground drama school in Minsk. In 2011 he received refugee status in the UK. He set up HUNCHtheatre with Oliver Bennett in 2018.
Oliver Bennett
Oliver trained at RADA and has worked extensively as an actor on stage and screen (The Coroner, All Is by My Side, Becoming Elizabeth, Ted Lasso). He is an award-winning playwright (Mercury Playwriting Award 2017), his work has been nominated for the Papatango and WiT Awards. His debut play 'Europe After the Rain' was produced at the Mercury Theatre in 2018 to critical acclaim ('a feverishly, fiercely relevant - a highly promising debut' The Stage), his adaptations of European classics have been hailed as 'very clever adaptation' (TLS) and 'original, witty' (Close Up Culture). His writing has been translated into Russian and performed around the world. He is a published prose writer and twice the recipient of a Peggy Ramsay Bursary. He set up HUNCHtheatre with Vladimir Shcherban in 2018.
The cover image on the events’ page: Christopher Moody, Flats in Water, courtesy of the artist