AS the Russian invasion of Ukraine goes into its second, brutal month, people in all walks of public life are asking themselves what they can do to assist the Ukrainian people.

That is certainly true of the Scottish theatre community, which is hosting a major fundraising event at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow on Tuesday.

Under the direction of the Tron’s artistic director Andy Arnold, a cast of 25 actors will present a rehearsed reading of The Grain Store, a modern classic by Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit. All proceeds will go the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Ukraine Appeal.

Vorozhbit’s play was selected following discussions Arnold had with a number of theatre colleagues, including the playwright Nicola McCartney, who is a friend of the Ukrainian writer.

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The Grain Store is a powerful piece about an early-20th century cataclysm in Ukraine.

The drama is set in a Ukrainian village during the Holodomor, the famine manufactured by the Soviet authorities in the early-1930s. A consequence of Stalin’s chaotic policy of forced land collectivisation, the famine took the lives of almost four million Ukrainians.

In its depiction of loss and suffering, and its sheer scale, Vorozhbit’s play seemed to Arnold to be “right for the occasion”. Early in the piece we encounter the “agitators”, a street theatre company whose job it is to promote the Soviet system. As such, they encourage the rural population to demand that supposedly wealthy peasants, known as Kulaks, hand over their food to the people.

This state-sponsored “agitation” sets neighbours against each other, and, finally, leads to catastrophe. “There’s one moment in the play, when people are dying of starvation”, Arnold comments.

“Then it’s announced that an American journalist is going to come and visit the village. So [the Soviet authorities] get the people who are still healthy enough to stand, put them into smart clothes, and put loads of food on the table.

“They have the people practising dancing to create this image of a wonderful, healthy village. They try to keep the people away from the food until the journalist arrives, so that they can film it.”

Arnold was astonished to hear recently of an event during the current Russian invasion that carries echoes of the pathos and the bleak humour of this scene from Vorozhbit’s play. “I heard last week that, in one of the besieged cities in Ukraine, where people were starving, the Russians brought a truck of food, and they had a film crew with them.

“Even though the people were starving, they all refused flatly to have any of it.”

In the end, the director says, the Russian forces had to resort to having members of their own ranks pretend to be grateful Ukrainians eating the food gifted to them by their invaders.

Vorozhbit herself will be painfully aware of the terrible similarities between aspects of the Holodomor and the current catastrophe in her homeland. Her friend McCartney reports that the dramatist is now a refugee in the Austrian capital Vienna, where she has fled with her 11-year-old daughter and her mother.

The Ukrainian writer has sent a letter to her Scottish theatre friends, which she has asked to be read out at the Tron during the fundraising event. In the letter, Arnold says, the playwright explains that “she’s left her husband, a writer, in Kyiv, ready to fight, with a gun in his hand.”

The charity event is intended,Arnold says, to reflect “some sort of connection between  us, as theatre people in Scotland, with the theatre community in Ukraine”.

Come Tuesday, the director and the large cast will spend all day rehearsing the play. “You can do quite a lot in a day,” says Arnold, who intends to be on-stage throughout the performance, facilitating the movement of the actors.

Arnold was mentored earlier in his career by the late, great Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor. “He used to be on-stage, often moving his people about”, Arnold remembers. “I’m going to be on-stage reading key stage directions and moving the actors about, if they’re not quite sure where they’re going.”

Although the cast will be seated at times, this will not be one of those rehearsed readings in which the actors sit on chairs for the entire duration and simply read from their scripts. Arnold wants the players to move around the stage, from time to time, to give a sense of the movement of people depicted by Vorozhbit’s play.

One of the reasons The Grain Store was selected for the event was that it enables a large number of actors to get involved. Arnold is not finding it difficult to assemble a cast of 25

players.

“There were a few people I contacted who said they weren’t available,” the director notes.

“But when they found out what it was, they said ‘right, I’m going to make myself available.’”

ON the night, the play will be read by a diverse company ranging from trained actors among the Tron Theatre’s staff to long-established stars of the Scottish stage, such as Alison Peebles and Gerry Mulgrew.

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The Tron will be paying all of the actors for a day’s rehearsal, plus an evening performance. However,

Arnold adds, “they’ve got the option of donating it on to the charity, which I know a lot of them will do”.

In another expression of solidarity from within the theatre community, the set and costume designer Tom Piper has made a special donation. Piper designed the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Grain Store back in 2009. The original drawings for that show are being framed and will be available for purchase at the Tron, with all money raised going to the DEC Ukraine Appeal.

“We’ll just work away,” says Arnold, “and try to find any other ways we can to raise money for the appeal.”

The rehearsed reading of The Grain Store will take place on Tuesday at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow. For tickets, visit: tron.co.uk