Actor Yanina Hope and Director Ivanka Polchenko Talk Self-Discovery in The Sound of Absence

Inspired by writer and performer Yanina Hope’s personal history, The Sound of Absence captures character Lenore’s transformative journey following the loss of her father. Shattered by his death and haunted by the relationship they didn’t have, Lenore finds that grief becomes an unexpected gateway to self-discovery and the woman she is becoming. 

Yanina and the show’s director Ivanka Polchenko talked to us about what the show’s title means, working on such personal material and how audiences are reacting to the show.

Tell us more about the title of the show and what it tells the audience about what they’re going to see?

Yanina: It points directly to the emotional and sensory world they are about to enter. It suggests that absence is not just something felt quietly or intellectually, but something almost audible. It's something that resonates, lingers, and shapes the space long after a person is gone.

In the show, absence is treated as an active presence. When someone we love dies, what remains isn’t only silence or emptiness, but a kind of internal noise: memories, unanswered questions, unspoken words, inherited voices. I was very drawn to that paradox and to the idea that loss can be loud, intrusive, and deeply physical, rather than purely void-like. It came from my own experience of realising that even when someone is gone, they continue to “sound” inside you in unexpected ways.

The show is also about a journey back to the self. We were trying to create an experience where the main character - and hopefully the audience alongside her - moves through different manifestations of absence: denial, anger, distance, memory, silence. I wanted these states to feel like passages rather than psychological labels, moments you pass through physically and emotionally. For me, confronting what’s missing became a way of reconnecting with parts of myself that had been shaped, limited, or defined by that absence. I hope the audience can recognise something of their own inner process in that movement.

Because music plays an equal role to text, I wanted the audience to feel grief and hopefully many other emotions rather than be told about it. The live piano and its pauses, repetitions and silences are there to carry what words can’t. People could listen not just to the story, but to themselves. Sound becomes a guide, leading both the character and the audience through shifts that are emotional, intuitive, and sometimes uncomfortable, but also quietly liberating.

The show is not meant to offer answers or closure. I wasn’t interested in explaining grief or resolving it neatly. I wanted absence to be inhabited, listened to, and slowly transformed. If the audience leaves feeling a little more open to their own internal questions, or more connected to parts of themselves they hadn’t listened to in a while, then the title has done its work.

You’ve worked across journalism, film and theatre. What did theatre allow you to explore in this story that other forms wouldn’t have?

Yanina: I’m very aware of how those forms tend to project something outward. Journalism frames reality, TV fixes it in time, and film mediates storytelling and emotions through a screen. Theatre, for me, does the opposite. It creates a place of common experience where artists and audience are living the same moment together, breathing the same air, sharing the same emotional temperature.

Theatre allowed me to explore this. Every emotion in the room is lived together by the performers and the audience at the same time which changes everything. The story is not delivered to the audience; it unfolds with them. Each performance becomes an indirect dialogue, shaped by the audience’s presence, their silence, their attention, their energy. No two nights are the same, and the piece subtly shifts every time because the room shifts.

This is something no other medium could give me. I can share raw, unfiltered emotions in real time, without the safety net of editing or repetition. I can be fully present and responsive, and in that presence there is a kind of mutual care. We were very conscious of creating a space where the audience could pause, breathe, and process what they were feeling as it was happening — not afterwards, not alone, but together.

Theatre offered the possibility of being there for the audience. They are not told what to think or feel, but are invited to experience, reflect, and reconnect with themselves. Ultimately, this production is less about presenting a narrative and more about offering a shared moment of recognition - a place where people can find themselves in their own thoughts and emotions, and feel less alone in them.

How did you work with composer and pianist Vladyslav Kuznetsov on the music for the show?

Ivanka: It is a story of mutual trust and understanding, speaking firstly from the artistic point of view. At the beginning, we discussed the idea of the show and tried to identify a theme, a sort of common ground beyond the plot, that would speak to both Yanina and Vladyslav. What resonated was the question of finding one’s self against the towering family figures we can encounter in our lives.

The creative process then developed independently with Yanina honing the story and Vladyslav researching musical aspects of what he wanted to convey. In the end, we had a finished script and a series of musical compositions that had to be pieced together into a whole. The building of a performance was a magical moment, carefully constructing the dialogue between two languages – the spoken word and non-verbal musical expression.

A true discovery was realising that music and text can support each other and bring out depth and unexpected nuances in each narrative. It’s like walking hand in hand. The specificity of the performance demands a very fine attention and a different quality of listening from both interpreters but as a result, each show is unique because there is an ongoing stimulation.

Though the show is based on your experiences, you’re not playing yourself. How did you negotiate the line between personal experience and theatrical character?

Yanina: From the very beginning it was important for me to think of the piece as autofiction, not autobiography. That distinction really mattered. The material comes from my life, from my relationship with my father, my experience of loss, my coming of age as a woman, but it is reshaped, reframed and transformed through fiction. Keeping that in mind was essential so the work wouldn’t collapse into self-indulgence or confession. The aim was never to document my grief, but to create a theatrical reality that could be engaging, dynamic and open enough for the audience to enter.

While writing, I was constantly negotiating that line and asking myself what served the story and what only served me. In autofiction you have to create distance, structure and tension, otherwise the material stays private. Fiction is what allows the personal to become universal, and that was always the goal.

The acting process was almost paradoxical. Usually, as an actor, you receive a new text and slowly build an imaginary world around it, creating the character through a certain distance. In this case, the text was already too close. I knew it inside out because I had lived it. The first step was actually to completely dissociate from the material, which was a tricky and sometimes painful process. I had to let go of my own emotional memory and stop “owning” the story. This is when the work with the director Ivanka Polchenko really kicked in. 

I could then return to the text as if I were encountering it for the first time, almost like an actor stepping into a role written by a playwright. I could reconstruct a new reality: new circumstances, a theatrical body, a character who carries traces of me but is not me. That distance made it possible to live inside a crafted theatrical world every night without reenacting my own life. 

This is also why it was so important to integrate music as another character. It creates an additional layer of distance and dialogue and holds emotion without explaining it. It carries what the text deliberately avoids spelling out, and often contradicts or resists the words. It prevents the piece from becoming purely psychological or confessional. The music became a partner on stage to respond to, lean into, or push against rather than an emotional trigger tied to my own memory. The negotiation between truth and invention, closeness and distance, text and sound was constant.

Looking back now, do you see the process of making this show as an act of understanding, resistance, or transformation — or something else entirely?

Yanina: It was one of self-discovery and self-empowerment as an artist, a woman and as part of a group. It wasn’t only about understanding grief or making sense of a coming of age; it was about discovering my own voice and learning to stand inside it without apology.

As a female artist, this process was deeply empowering. Making this show meant claiming space artistically, emotionally, and politically without asking for permission or simplifying myself to fit expectations. It allowed me to trust my intuition, my contradictions, my softness and my strength at the same time. I wasn’t interested in resistance for its own sake, but there was something quietly radical in choosing complexity, restraint, and emotional honesty.

At the same time, it was very much a collective process of empowerment for us as a group of immigrant artists. We come from different countries, languages, and artistic traditions, and making this work in London was also about finding our place here — understanding how we speak from our backgrounds rather than trying to neutralise them. In the rehearsal room, we could listen to each other, challenge one another, and build a shared artistic language that felt truthful.

The show also became a way of locating ourselves within the London theatre scene  not by imitating what already exists, but by contributing something that comes from lived experience and collaboration. It helped us realise that our difference is not something to smooth out, but something to lean into. The process wasn’t just understanding or transformation — it was about finding confidence, agency, and a sense of belonging, both individually and together.

How do you feel about audience members feedback that they have gone on to rethink their own relationships with their parents after seeing the show?

Ivanka: It really came as a surprise. I remember being completely at a loss when we finished the run-through on the evening before the first performance not knowing what the audience would make of the show.

I was imagining that for some, there would be too much music or too many words, they would consider it overemotional, too serious or too personal to let oneself be taken by the story. So the actual feedback is incredibly encouraging.

At the same time, it validates the inner process of research we went through while trying to convey the story. I guess we found the right “notes” that struck across the common experience of growing up, hating and loving one’s parents, learning power dynamics of a relationship, feeling one’s own incompleteness, accepting nice and ugly sides, understanding the failings and discovering the strengths. Everything that encompasses being human, no matter the age or generation, gender, origin and background. It is a celebration of our fragile humanity.

The Sound of Absence is at Omnibus Theatre from 24th - 28th February. For more go to https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/sound-of-absence/