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MARIUPOL

 
Rebecca Vines Review by Rebecca Vines 4 Published: 5 Aug 2025 Pleasance Courtyard Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-25 Aug 2025

It was Joseph Stalin who is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” It is a sentiment that haunts the ether around our comfortable television sets in our comfortable living rooms. For whether we choose to neglect, ignore, feel or demonstrate against the horrors of war and the highly discriminate loss of life, it is hard – faced with so much evidence of man’s inhumanity to man – to comprehend the full devastation being wrought in all too many corners of the world. Harder still is the task of giving each obliterated life the full and idiosyncratic weight it deserves in death.

A love story played out against a megalomaniac’s imagination.

In Katia Haddad’s MARIUPOL, two of the beating hearts behind the statistics are imagined through the eyes of Galina (a Moscow student) and Steve (a Ukrainian naval officer). Initially brought together by a chance meeting in the 1990s, the intertwining of their lives – and their unbreakable regard for each other – belies the aggression of Galina’s homeland and the vulnerability of Steve’s.

The performances are exceptionally strong: Nathalie Barclay is heartbreaking as a woman ripped apart by happenstance. Oliver Gomm allows his character of Steve to mature across the hour – much as Steve’s blokey demeanour planes into something smoother with pain and time.

Mariupol has known such Russian hostility in recent years that its name has joined an unwelcome club of locations known as immediate and horrific bywords for human suffering. Yet this is not a piece full of declamatory political statements – and what it achieves is, in fact, far more powerful. It is a simple, messy love story of two simple, messy people, played out against the brutal horrors of a megalomaniac’s imagination. Eking out their days as best they can. Trying to make logical decisions in illogical times. And finally, reminding us that such people are not statistics – but that they are us.

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The Blurb:

After a successful first run at The Cockpit in London, MARIUPOL now comes to Edinburgh for the first time. Written by Katia Haddad, MARIUPOL is based on her treasured memories of the city and accounts of the survivors of the siege. Summer 1992. MARIUPOL. Galina, a student from Moscow, meets Steve, a charismatic Ukrainian navy officer. 30 years later, she comes back looking for him in a bunker under the bombed Azovstal. Even on the opposite sides of the war, their lives are connected. MARIUPOL is directed by Award-winning director Guy Retallack.