REVIEW: THE TRUMPETER at Finborough Theatre until 3 August 2024

‘Milward throws herself into the passion and physicality of Goncharova's words … ★★★

An abandoned steel works, deep underground, now the corpse-filled, rubble-strewn site of a regiment's last stand, as missiles rain down from above….No, this isn't a WWII period piece, or a dystopian drama. It's Ukraine in 2022, and playwright Inna Goncharova has written a deeply personal story about her country's experience.

The Trumpeter is Goncharova's second collaboration with performer Kristin Milward and the Finborough. Two years ago, they put on the award-winning Pussycat in Memory of Darkness, also about the horrors of the Russian invasion. Goncharova and Milward are a fitting match: Milward throws herself into the passion and physicality of Goncharova's words.  She's equally at ease speaking poetically about mountains in springtime - John Farndon's translation is evocative - and mimicking the missile strikes with her voice.

But the piece's conviction and fury don't quite gel with its form. The Trumpeter is a one-woman show about a military musician trapped during the Siege of Mariupol, desperately trying to channel the violence into a grand "Symphony of War". His bandmates are all dead. Only an injured lieutenant, a nurse and a lawyer remain. It is in music that his last hope of making sense of it all lies. "Even with explosions and gunfire," his comrade says, "you're still looking for harmony."

Goncharova has crafted her show around music as metaphor, and she makes her theatricality explicit: "Sometimes this whole basement feel likes a theatre set," the trumpeter says. As though his band isn't dead—just waiting in the wings, ready to come out to a flurry of applause. Sometimes, this knowing abstraction works: "Imagine it's dark," the trumpeter tells us at the start, as the lights flare up. Often, it distances us from the raw emotion that fuels the piece. "Thinking of God, I think he's forgotten his way down here"—"The war was meant to destroy us all, so if we survive that's already a major victory"—"War doesn't have a nature…it's in our nature." It's lines like these that hit home. With Milward's trumpeter broken, delirious from the start, it's hard to enjoy the metaphorical cleverness.

The design and directing team has made good use of the Finborough's tiny space, with a stripped-back aesthetic that relies on sound, atmospheric lighting and four chairs, each symbolising a character. One of the most effective scenes was Milward staging a conversation between two of those empty chairs, the injured lieutenant struggling to confess his love to the nurse. More visual specificity like this, and fewer general breakdowns, might have served the production.

Still, The Trumpeter is story that needs to be told. And the Finborough is supplementing almost every performance with post-show events: providing a venue for Ukrainian musicians, poets, roundtable discussions. The sense of community, of gravity, this produced was palpable. We should not forget, the theatre's team told us, that this is real, and is continuing to happen today—and the Finborough has dedicated most of July to driving this crucial point home.

The Trumpeter

9 July – 3 August

Box Office https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-trumpeter/

Written by: Inna Goncharova

Translated by: John Farndon

Performed by: Kristin Milward

Lighting & Sound Design by: Hakan Hafizoglu

Directed and Designed by: Vladimir Shcerban