I can’t recommend this enough.

Five plays in one go sounds like too much to cram in. But treated as extended ‘sketches’ the concept works and the 160 minutes, including an interval, passed quickly. And the full evil of Russia is made plain.

In between them, bandura player Mariia Petrovska provided context before cooing beautiful Ukrainian melodies. The Arcola theatre has unearthed an angel!

Always

Written by Oscar-nominated and Bafta winning writer/director Jonathan Myerson this set up the background to current events.

A bedroom in the Hotel Ukraina is the scene as two Berkut gunmen burst in to gain a good vantage point where they can kill protesters in the Maidan Square in central Kyiv in February 2014, shortly before Viktor Yanukovych gave up the ghost and fled the country.

The gunmen are authentically cold and dressed as ‘titushki’ – but perhaps not nearly as evil as the real thing on the day – as events where more than 100 people were shot dead unfold.

But the dialogue between the killers and the hotel room occupants sounds like opposing newspaper op-eds being quoted at each other and doesn’t really flow. Almost as if it’s a history crammer to which you need to pay strict attention in order to get the full gist – so the tension doesn’t quite grip you in the way that several of the other playlets manage.

Five Day War

This was the standout of the five.

In a remote forest home near Kyiv in 2022 a Russian spook assembles prominent Ukrainians felt to be pro-Putin to whip them into shape to be the new government once the invasion has succeeded.

Phones are confiscated and the candidates are not updated on the course of the invasion on February 24, 2022, and are unaware of how it might pan out. Russian names for cities are used – a Ukrainian speaker from Dnipro is rebuked for using the Ukrainian for Kharkiv.

Well observed, insightful and a masterclass in portraying how Russia tries to control narratives through monumental bullshit narratives that unfortunately still gain traction four years after the full-scale invasion. Think scheming bastards, psychological games, pure evil.

Writer David Edgar’s Royal Shakespeare Company pedigree comes to the fore and it nails Russian slipperiness, verbal slime, veiled menace, craven ambition. David Michaels is excellent as the willing accomplice who realises too late that the entire project is a dud enterprise and conveys his unease at being hoodwinked into backing the enterprise.

A superb, and accurate, portrayal of the rampant evil at the top of Russia’s leadership.

Three Mates

The only piece written by a Ukrainian Natalka Voryzbhyt, pictured, and translated by Sasha Dugdale.

Not enough attention is paid to what Ukrainians actually say – few Westerners truly get the full picture or delve more deeply into what is the pivotal conflict to have broken out in Europe in the last 70 years.

And it would have been good to see further Ukrainian writers featured here – but the Brits haven’t done too badly,

Eighteen months ago, while in Ukraine, it was obvious there were few men aged betwen 25 and 60 in the streets.

The reasons, I supposed, were: all at war, or at home resting (deservedly), or dodging being round up to join the fight. The memory of one student, aged 19, telling me his father, an actor in Poltava, being called up will stay with me. He was 47.

So this playlet focused on the self-loathing of a young man as he avoided being called up by remaining at home while texting his pal in Vienna who bribed his way out of Ukraine early on, and another pal who joined up almost immediately.

It convincingly conveyed the paranoia and fear rampant in a country struggling with PTSD as conflict enters a fifth year. There will surely be some sort of reckoning in post-war Ukraine.

Wretched Things

Frontline philosophy from soldiers under attack in a loud, frightening portrayal of combat.

A soldier berates his sergeant for wanting to take a wounded Korean fighting for Russia to safety instead of shooting him so he and a colleague can be evacuated from the area on a motorbike.

Tramautic and containing a hidden punch.

And also the best line of the night from Sarge, in response to comment that the location of debate was not a seminar room: ‘I’d say the eastern front of Ukraine is precisely the seminar room of the world right now.’

Brainy, perhaps a bit too intellectual, but a haunting scene written by David Greig, recently artistic director the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh.

Taken

Finally, a mother’s tale of tracking down her daughter, 12, who was in effect abducted at gunpoint in Mariupol by the Russians and sent to a camp near Moscow to be ‘Russified’.

A network exists to track down the children through social media posts and some have been rescued by parents forced to travel through Poland and Belarus to fetch them home.

All emotional buttons are punched hard by mum Jade Williams and daughter Clara Read as the family is thrust into chaos and despair by Mr Putin’s evil regime and the murderous hate it is carrying out, day in day out.

• Ukraine Unbroken runs until Saturday, March 28, 2026.