Internationally acclaimed company HUNCHtheatre, have created this book as part of a fundraising campaign to keep the company alive and make it possible to work with our departments in London and Belarus. This book is our personal response to not being able to perform. We are trying out new artistic avenues and experimenting with what theatre can be.
HUNCHtheatre is an acclaimed international company set up by multi-award-winning director Vladimir Shcherban and award-winning playwright Oliver Bennett in April 2018. Our ethos is to create a cultural exchange between European and British theatre, to breathe life into neglected masterpieces and explore what how they resonate today.
Our first show, an adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero Of Our Time began life in a social housing living room in London, performing for just 10 people. Since then we have performed it across the world and even an abandoned swimming pool in London during lockdown, all to huge critical acclaim. It was listed as one of the best pieces of theatre of 2018 by Broadway World, and called ‘a vision of what theatre should be’ (The Spectator), ‘a blistering feat of storytelling’ (The Stage), ‘a very clever adaptation’ (TLS).
We also produced the world’s first response to the Novichok attack, To See Salisbury, which played at RADA, then Ukraine and across America. The Legend of the Holy Drinker - an adaptation of a neglected 1939 masterpiece by Austrian writer Joseph Roth - premiered at the Vault Festival 2020.
We are currently working on several new projects including an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's masterpiece 'Virgin Soil' which will explore the nature of activism. We have a department in Minsk, HUNCHtheatreBelarus, that has recently worked in very difficult circumstances on a new show, Scattering Ravens.