Grain Store

Ukraine 1929. As Stalin launches the first of his Five-Year Plans, a closeknit rural community stands unwittingly in the path of his drive to create a thriving socialist Soviet Union. The outcome is catastrophic.

What begins for the people of the village as an amusingly alien concept rapidly becomes an unstoppable force for change. Robbed first of their land, then their religion and independence, the whole country soon becomes engulfed by a tragedy that will scar a nation for generations.

Natal'ya Vorozhbit's play The Grain Store was first staged in this English translation by Sasha Dugdale by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2009.

Natalka Vorozhbyt (aka Natal'ya Vorozhbit / Natal'ia Vorozhbyt) is a Ukrainian playwright and a leader in the resurgence of Ukrainian national drama in the 21st century. She writes in both Ukrainian and Russian. Her first major play, Galka Motalko, had success shortly after she graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute (Moscow) in 2000. The Grain Store, a historical work about the Holodomor, the state-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2009. Vorozhbyt took part in the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013 and 2014, and the theme of the ensuing war with Russia has coloured her work since. In 2015 she co-founded the Theater of Displaced People with Georg Genoux, offering an opportunity for refugees from the Donbass region to tell their stories in a formal, theatrical context. Her other plays include Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha, which received its UK premiere as part of A Play, A Pie and A Pint: International Plays from Ukraine and Russia at Òran Mór, Glasgow, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2015; and Bad Roads (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2017). Bad Roads was made into a film directed by the author, which was Ukraine's official Oscar selection in 2022. Vorozhbyt also wrote the screenplay for Cyborgs (2017), a film about the defence of an airport in Donetsk where Ukrainian soldiers fought separatists for 242 days. Sasha Dugdale is a translator and poet. She has translated the work of many leading contemporary playwrights writing in Russian, including: Bad Roads (Royal Court Theatre, 2017) and The Grain Store (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009) by Natal'ya Vorozhbit; Playing the Victim (Royal Court and Told By an Idiot, 2003) and Terrorism (Royal Court, 2003) by the Presnyakov Brothers; and Ladybird (Royal Court, 2004), Black Milk (Royal Court, 2003) and Plasticine (Royal Court, 2002) by Vassily Sigarev. She has published three collections of translations of Russian poetry and five collections of her own poetry, most recently Deformations (Carcanet, 2020). In 2016 she won a Forward Prize for her long poem ‘Joy’, and in 2017 she received a SOA Cholmondeley Award for poetry. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry and three collections of her own poetry, Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007) and Red House (2011). In 2003 she received an Eric Gregory Award.