In January 2024, Sputnik was invited by Professor Andreas Schönle (University of Bristol) to support the final year Russian Studies assessments. This collaboration was based on Sputnik’s work staging dissident Russian playwriting over almost two decades.
“For the last seven years, before the war, I made socially engaged art in Russia. We built utopias, an alternative space of freedom and equality in conditions of Putin’s thickening authoritarianism. The war showed that art won’t stop people who have access to the red button. The experience of Yellowcake allowed me to understand that there are too few utopias today. Art has the power and instruments to become a real facilitator between civil society and powerful institutions in the battle for a fairer future. As a minimum, it can give the experience of revealing oneself as an actor in history, and the desire to make that experience last.”
Commissioned by the academic journal Cultural Geographies in Practice, Sputnik’s artistic director wrote a performance review about Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe (2022) at the Barbican. ‘On 12 March 2022, I attended Dogs of Europe, a performance by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) at London’s Barbican Theatre. Adapted from the novel by Belarusian writer Alhierd […]
Thinking with the body Elli Salo is an artist with many strings to her bow. Playwright, writer, author of radio plays, translator, teacher. In recent years, you would be just as likely to hear her plays in Finnish and international theatres as you would be to hear them in libraries, museums and on the radio […]
The Ukrainian film commissioned by Sputnik – Andrii Bondarenko’s Peace and Tranquility – has won a special jury award at the Kinosarai Film Festival
This year Sputnik Theatre Company – in collaboration with Slanguages (Birmingham City University) and Creative Multilingualism (University of Oxford) – launches an original hip-hop drama, FAM, as an online film, exploring notions of black British identity, urban music and racial injustice. In this blog, I explain how this project was conceived – and how we […]
We are delighted to announce that Andriy Bondarenko‘s “Peace and Tranquility” (trans. John Farndon) was invited for screening at the Sheffield DocFest on 23 and 26 June 2022. The screenings will be followed by a discussion with the film’s director Myro Klochko who attends in person. Commissioned by Sputnik Theatre Company.
We are delighted to announce that Peace and Tranquillity by Andriy Bondarenko, translated by John Farndon, directed by Myro Klochko, commissioned/produced by Sputnik has a London screening at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art – on 27 April 2022.
Interview about the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre (Moscow) with John Freedman, interview by Noah Birksted-Breen, as part of the International Online Theatre Festival.
In 2014, the state-run journal, Kultura, named 20 plays which it very embodiment of ‘sleaze, obscenities, pornography, and worthless shamanism disguised as innovation’. In other words, it was a blatant attack on cultural innovators, playwrights, artists who dissent from the dominant state ideology. The play which heads the list as the most offensive play is […]
At 6pm-7.30pm on 4th of June 2018, Sputnik will present a reading of Ukrainian-speaking Elephants by Natalia Vorozhbit (Ukraine), translated by Sasha Dugdale, at UCL’s Festival of Culture in London, the first presentation of this play in England. The cast is: Sophia Kayes, James Robinson, Géhane Strehler. Directed by: Noah Birksted-Breen. The reading will take […]
By Noah Birksted-Breen. This article was originally published on the Creative Multilingualism website. I have just finished translating Mikhail Durnenkov’s The War Hasn’t Yet Started for the third time in as many years. I’m in an unusual situation – one translator creating three different versions of the same play. As far as I know, that […]
The Theatre Times Interview with Noah Birksted-Breen
AK: How would you define New Russian Drama in a single word?
GS: Fresh. I know that this term does not describe a specific theme or style, but as far as I can tell, there was no single theme or group of themes or unifying style that holds these plays together. New Russian Drama was, however, fresh relative to the plays that were being staged at the time.
An interview about the project at Theatre 503 – original article by going to this link. Reproduced (unformatted) below. Theatre louder than politics Is it Getting Cold in Here…?, a selection of plays on contemporary Russia, currently runs at Theatre503. The Kompass spoke to Nina Belenitskaya and Evgeny Kazachkov, the two Russian playwrights part of […]
The Spanish edition of Russia Beyond The Headlines interviewed Noah Birksted-Breen in May 2014.
Sputnik’s artistic director, Noah Birksted-Breen, has organised a panel discussion at Queen Mary University, as part of QUORUM, a bi-weekly public seminar for academics, PhD students and theatre practitioners. The title is: ‘Changes in the landscape of contemporary playwriting: 2000-2014’. Confirmed speakers are: Sebastian Born, Associate Director (Literary), National Theatre Chris Campbell, Literary Manager, Royal […]
“The Sputnik Theatre Company also offers a glimmer of hope. If the taste for Russian theatre in Britain is going to get out of its 19th-century rut, it may well start here.” To read the full article – click here.
‘We must refuse to forget the case of Sergei Magnitsky. Congratulations to the [Sputnik theatre] company…’ Sir Tom Stoppard video here
One Hour Eighteen Minutes
