Innovative new play co-written by alumna to premiere in Cambridge

Maria Montague

A compelling new verbatim play about the lives of people who experienced the war in the Ukraine will be premiered in Cambridge.

The Summer Before Everything was co-written by Maria Montague (NC 2011) in partnership with Bohdan Tokarskyi, a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre in which plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.

Montague and Tokarskyi recorded extended interviews with more than one hundred Ukrainians displaced from Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014.

Their stories will now be showcased in The Summer before Everything at the Hotbed Theatre Festival at the Junction on July 9 2016 at 2pm and 7pm.

Montague said: “I graduated from Newnham, having studied French, Russian and Ukrainian. On my year abroad, I lived in Kyiv at the time of the Maidan Revolution. This was an incredibly moving experience for me and I was completely blown away by the peace and optimism of the people protesting for European values and less corruption.

“After leaving Ukraine, I followed the news avidly and was devastated when war broke out. I studied Ukrainian in my final year at Cambridge and my interest in Ukrainian Studies grew. I felt really eager to be actively engaged in a project linked with recent events in Ukraine and decided on creating a verbatim play.

“I wanted to discover the human stories behind all of these dramatic events and teamed up with Bohdan in order to carry out interviews and compose a play together. We have now been working on this play together for over a year and we’re so excited that it’s going to be staged for the first time at the Hotbed Festival!”

Montague directed many productions during her time at Cambridge, including “Assassins” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Book tickets for The Summer Before Everything.

Photo caption: Maria Montague at the Maidan protests in Kyiv on her year abroad.