Review: Donbas (Theatre503)

Review by Lily Melhuish

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Planes pass overhead. Radio static flickers. Voices murmur beyond thin walls. From its first minutes, Donbas saturates Theatre503 with a soundscape of a world in crisis, yet insists our focus stays intimate: a cup of tea, a shared joke, a freshly baked gingerbread house. Ukrainian playwright Olga Braga’s debut, directed by Anthony Simpson‑Pike, transcends the subgenre of the “war play” by offering a story of humanity on the precipice of conflict.

Set in February 2022, with Donbas under occupation and the full‑scale invasion looming, the play holds two spaces in tension: an abandoned house and a cramped family home. Designer Niall McKeever presents us with peeling walls, a bare mattress, and a ragged hole in the ceiling that literally lets in the snow. What begins as a stark indication of poverty becomes both a playground for the imagination of mythic warriors and a cage for fear, with tables and chairs becoming hurried barricades.

Before the play even reaches the family drama, Braga introduces us to a superbly drawn double act: Dmitry and Alexei. Jack Bandeira and Philippe Spall craft a recognisable rapport between young and old, naïve and battle-worn Russian soldiers. Bandeira’s seemingly foolish Alexei pushes and prods at Dmitry with calculated inquisitiveness, testing the boundaries and clawing under the skin. Spall’s Dmitry, meanwhile, is all damaged composure. A man who has seen enough violence to mistrust anything frivolous, he bats away Alexei’s trivia and invasive questions with weary impatience. Through Alexei’s binocular‑assisted commentary, we hear the names of the townspeople we’ve yet to meet. Despite the derelict room and rifles, the opening is surprisingly humorous and establishes a key theme: laughter is vital to survival.

Once the family drama comes into focus, Braga structures the piece around universal generational contrasts. Multi-rolling Bandeira is all restless voltage as Sashko, the idealist son, newly returned from a Russian prison after having thrown rocks at enemy soldiers. His father, Seryoga (also Spall) carries the weight of survival logic: take each day as it comes, keep your head down, stay out of trouble. But Seryoga’s pragmatism is complicated. He is diabetic, reliant on insulin, which is controlled by the Russian authorities. He carries a Russian passport to obtain his medication, a decision Sashko sees as capitulation, even betrayal. Braga mirrors a national divide within a household: the older characters, shaped by eras that no longer exist, making do with the cards they’ve been dealt; the younger, staring at a future already marred by destruction, refusing compromise.

Around them, the community oscillates with vibrancy and life. Liz Kettle’s Vera clings to appearances with ravish‑me‑red lipstick and box‑blonde hair dye, her rituals a fierce grip on normalcy. She and Ivan (Steve Watts) flirt and tease with old‑Hollywood charm, a way of resetting their surroundings to a world before it broke. Sasha Syzonenko’s Marianca, Seyoga’s Moldovan girlfriend, possesses the shaved edges of someone who hasn’t been home in far too long, eroded by the need to fit into places she doesn’t naturally belong in order to survive.

And Ksenia Devriendt’s Nadya, initially non-verbal after her mother’s disappearance, becomes the play’s conscience. Infantilised by those around her despite being a teenager, Devriendt’s performance brims with inner fire. Nadya’s imagination is where the play’s form fractures: she dresses as a Cossack and becomes a warrior, creating a mythology that helps her understand a world that no longer makes sense. Her philosophical exchanges with Sashko on faith and legacy are highlights. The play is lucid about the difficulty of belief amidst rubble, yet finds a humbler spirituality in Sashko’s idea of “good dying”: a return to soil and wind, not for glory but to belong.

Simpson‑Pike leans into rhythmic overlap: scenes slide fluidly, dialogue spills across rooms, the domestic bumping up against the mythic. The bigger picture of nightly curfews, gunshots, and hissing aircraft overhead remains present without flattening the human scale into headlines. The humour is essential in creating this balance, Bandeira’s adeptness at sarcasm proving to be a particular strength, keeping the grief from becoming overwhelming. Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss and even Chuck Norris get a mention. It’s funny, but the comedy never distracts, only serving to develop these thoroughly well-drawn characters.

If the show wobbles, it’s where the drama grazes familiar beats: a father‑son scuffle, a witnessed infidelity, a charming, heroic figure. These near‑tropes threaten predictability, but the ensemble’s dedication and reality of the circumstances just about manage to keep the production grounded. More contentious is the literal manifestation of the Cossacks onstage, where suggestion is powerful, embodiment feels a shade too literal. The imaginative world built by Nadya and Sashko is compelling enough without reinforcement.

What lingers is how fully human the ensemble remains. Hope permeates the production: Vera dreams of Hollywood glamour; Ivan of his earlier life; Nadya of myth; Marianca of her son; Sashko of a better future; Seryoga simply of surviving today. Braga captures universal tensions: parents who cannot win, generations colliding over ideals, and the rituals that preserve dignity in chaos. Donbas shows how people move from survival to resilience, that community, imagination and humour are the lifeblood that carry them across that threshold.

Donbas plays at Theatre503 until 28th February. Tickets from https://theatre503.com/whats-on/donbas/

Photos by Helen Murray