Bad roads

BAD ROADS – Best Performance in the "Large Stage Performance" category at the Melpomene of Tavria Festival 2019

Six stories about life and war

Winner of the "Kyiv Account" award — Best Performance of 2018.

The war in eastern Ukraine is not just about explosions, shelling, and the names of the fallen. Behind the scenes, on both sides of the front line, the lives of (un)ordinary people continue, bound together by the shattered roads of Donbas.

A young woman travels to eastern Ukraine in search of documentary material about the war, but there, in the grey zone of the borderlands, she becomes a hostage to both her own and others' stories. She experiences them as if through a looking glass, where good and evil no longer exist, where victim and executioner swap roles, and love becomes fleeting and elusive.

Bad Roads is six stories about the relationships between women and men, sharpened and distorted by war, and about fractures that will never heal.

This play is one of the first statements about the war in eastern Ukraine on a major theater stage. Natalka Vorozhbit wrote it while collecting stories and testimonies from real people for the script of Cyborgs (directed by Akhtem Seitablaiev). But while Cyborgs is about myth and valor, Bad Roads is about life itself, which will always prevail over death.

The play premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in October 2017. The Ukrainian premiere took place on September 27, 2018, at Stage 6.

Age restriction: 18+

Attention! The performance contains profanity.