Eurovision: Ukrainian refugees bring their history to life at Liverpool festival - BBC Newsnight

It's day one of rehearsals and the actors are greeted by a welcome circle with staff from the Unity Theatre. They're home for the next four weeks. Hello everyone, my name is Sharena, I'm an actress and I will play main role Maria. Sharena is married to director Yuri. They've been in their first home with daughter Yana for three months when bombs hit Kyiv. We woke up at five o'clock because our house was shaked. Kyiv, a city of three million, awoke to sirens.

When we started to drive from our house, we saw a lot of broken cars, people. And it was frightened, yeah, it was frightened. Hi everyone, I'm Olena and I play Nadia, who is Maria's daughter. I went to university in Kharkiv. We did our last performance in student theatre on 23rd of February. And then I remember 5am, my friends were like running around the room, picking up clothes and everything and I was like, what are you doing? And it started. I was like, what started? The war started.

Russia is accused of killing hundreds of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Olena had one of the most difficult escapes, being trapped in Kharkiv and gripped with a constant worry about her family. So I've been there for like three weeks, I guess, in the metro station. And then we tried to escape from Kharkiv. I remember we spent two or three nights on different railway stations without food, without water, without phones, you don't have access to talk to your family, you don't know, are they still alive? Yuri's job is to get this performance from the rehearsal room and onto the stage in just four weeks. The play focuses on Ukrainian woman Maria, charting her life from birth to death. It's the story of how Russian occupants break her life, like break Ukraine.

And this story will be about the hardest page of our history. I mean, Holodomor. The Holodomor, literally translated as to kill by hunger, was a Soviet engineer famine of the 1930s. Being the largest grain producer in the Soviet Union, Ukraine was subjected to higher grain quotas than other regions, leading to fewer crops for Ukrainians and causing mass starvation of the population. While estimates vary, academics put the death toll at a minimum of 3.5 million people killed. Why Stalin enforced this policy is a matter of contention.

To some, it was merely a consequence of the industrialization of the Soviet Union. Others, say Stalin, fearing a growing cultural divergence from Moscow, forced the famine as a way to further subdue Ukraine. Most of the cast were prominent performers back home, treading the boards in the country's top theatres and some of Ukraine's biggest films and TV shows. I worked in the National Theatre. I played Juliet, Juliet and Romeo. I used to be an actor of the National Theatre and it was very important and exciting. We used to work with Vladimir Ruslensky for several years.

He was a great manager at that time and he's quite a great manager now. Great manager, yeah. It's week two and the theatre is changing all of its signage into Ukrainian, ahead of the start of Liverpool's Eurovision Festival. As rehearsals intensify, there's a new cast member joining the company. It will be the first time when I'll act in English. It's a good opportunity to tell British people in their language about us, about our culture, about Ukraine. Yuriy Shireena and daughter Yana have lived with the host family in Derbyshire since arriving in the UK last year.

Every day they make the three hour round trip from Derbyshire to Liverpool. Yeah, it's not easy but it's okay because we love it. With a week to go until opening night, the actors are now mostly without scripts and connecting to the scenes in a more visceral way. I have a couple of scenes when my dad, my scene dad, goes to the war and it's just the same feeling. It is really emotional. I'm worrying about my family like every minute. I'm worrying about my father, my mother, my sisters and it is really hard.

And it's taking a toll on almost everyone. It's difficult to be here and enjoy the life for 100%. It's impossible because our parents, our friends, still in Ukraine. With just hours to go until the play opens, the cast have almost finished their final dress rehearsal. I waited for this feeling for so long. It's one and a half years, almost. Some of the cast haven't set foot on a stage since leaving Ukraine and after weeks of preparation, it curtains up.

All the land where to be given to the poor. For the audience, which includes lots of local Ukrainians, it was a poignant evening. It was very touching because, from my opinion, Holodomor is one of the most terrible page of Ukrainian history. I thought it was tremendous and I couldn't believe I'd never heard of this atrocity. It's been an intense five weeks for this company of performers juggling jobs, family life as well as rehearsals. So it's a testament to their resilience that this group of Ukrainians have come together in a new land to tell powerful stories of home. The film is based on the story of a young Ukrainian soldier who was killed in a car accident in the city of Lviv.

He was killed in a car accident in the city of Lviv. He was killed in a car accident in the city of Lviv. He was killed in a car accident in the city of Lviv. He was killed in a car accident in the city of Lviv.

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