Skip to main content
Kiss of death by video
Uniformity of ‘talking heads’ presentation annihilates all possibility of conveying the true drama inherent in the play, suggests GORDON PARSONS
L to R) Toy Soldierand Zaporozhian (Cossack)

Planet Speranta
Finborough Theatre Online

 

FINBOROUGH Theatre’s Frontier has unearthed this 1965 work by a leading Soviet-Ukrainian playwright, Oleksii Kolomiiets, for its Voices From Ukraine programme of YouTube plays and interviews.

Planet Speranta (Hope) has five WWII Soviet soldiers holed up in a Ukrainian bunker surrounded by German troops.

One by one they are anonymously ordered out, presumably on a desperate attempt to report to their base while those left discuss life, love, fear and death.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
nazi nightmares
Books / 2 May 2025
2 May 2025

GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin

titus
Theatre review / 2 May 2025
2 May 2025

GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare

Pier Paolo Pasolini as Chaucer in his film of The Canterbury
Books / 16 October 2024
16 October 2024
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
Books / 6 August 2024
6 August 2024
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
Similar stories
CANNY EYE: Photographer Martin Parr
Cinema / 20 February 2025
20 February 2025
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews I Am Martin Parr, September Says, The Monkey, and The Gorge
(L) Nightbitch; (R) Porcelain War
Cinema / 5 December 2024
5 December 2024
Horror for young mothers and Western presidents, a one-legged wrestler and weaponised art; the Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Nightbitch, Rumours, Unstoppable and Porcelain War
Album reviews / 9 September 2024
9 September 2024
New releases from David Grubb, Bright Eyes and Trygve Seim, Frode Haltli
Our Mothers, directed by Cesar Diaz. Guatemala/Belgium/Franc
Cinema / 9 May 2024
9 May 2024
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger; Our Mothers; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes; and The Almond and the Seahorse