'I want the experience to feel liberating’ - Yanina Hope on her new show The Sound of Absence

Inspired by writer and performer Yanina Hope’s relationship with her own father, The Sound of Absence follows Lenore and her journey of self-discovery following the death of her father. Though initially she feels shattered by his passing and haunted by the relationship they didn’t have, his death becomes an unexpected catalyst for change leading to a more honest relationship with herself.  Yanina is joined on stage by a live pianist Vladyslav Kuznetsov whose music guides Lenore on her journey.

We sat down with Yanina to talk putting her father’s life on stage, silence and how audiences are rethinking their own relationships with their parents after seeing the show

Though the show begins with your father’s death, it’s more about your journey. At what point did you realise the story was really about you, not him?

I didn’t realise it at first and I think that delay is important. In the beginning, my father’s death felt like the only possible centre of gravity - the event that ruptured everything. But as I kept writing, I noticed something unsettling, I wasn’t trying to resurrect him on the page, and I wasn’t even trying to mourn him conventionally, I was circling my own reactions, my lack of reaction, my resistance to grief, my refusal to perform it properly. I was listening to something quieter and much more uncomfortable.

There’s a line from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (I love this book!)  that stayed with me throughout the process: “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” That sentence describes exactly what I encountered after my father died. Here was no dramatic void, no overwhelming grief, just a strange, hollow stillness And I realised it wasn’t created by his absence. It had been there long before and his death simply made it audible.

Eventually I understood that the most pressing question in the play wasn’t asking who he was or how to live without him, but why I wasn’t feeling what I was supposed . That question had nothing to do with him anymore. It was about the emotional landscape I had grown up with, the restraint, the self-sufficiency, the refusal to need. His authority, his strength, even his emotional distance had shaped that and then he was gone, the structure remained but I was the only one left inside it. 

The repetition in the play - “My dad died X days ago and I don’t feel this way” - comes from that realisation. It isn’t about grief; it’s an argument with my own emptiness. His death didn’t create a void; it removed the noise that had been covering it. And in that silence, I wasn’t meeting him - I was meeting myself, 

Were there emotions or truths you initially resisted putting onstage? And if you changed your mind, what convinced you to include them?

Yes absolutely, mainly out of fear and personal insecurity, to be honest with you. I was scared of exposing my father in a way that could feel unfair or reductive, especially in public. I worried about how my whole family would receive it, and whether I had the right to speak so openly about his life, his choices, his flaws. There was a real hesitation around how much was too much.

What shifted was realising that avoiding those truths wouldn’t protect him - it would simply make him and me smaller!  My father was a very big human being with big strengths and big weaknesses. He was also a heart surgeon who lived every day under enormous pressure and responsibility. Sometimes he was literally holding other people’s lives in his hands and that shaped his sense of control, duty, and emotional restraint. That weight didn’t stay in the operating room; it followed him home and quietly structured the lives of everyone around him. When I say in the play, “He was an Atlas holding the world above our shoulders,” it isn’t praise, it’s an attempt to describe the weight he carried and how that shaped everyone around him.

I understood then that my responsibility wasn’t to preserve an image, but to seek understanding. Theatre allows for contradicting emotions to coexist and that felt like the only truthful way forward. The piece isn’t a documentary; but emotionally, it had to remain honest.

Music plays an active role in the storytelling, where did this idea come from to use music in this way?

This came from a personal frustration with text-driven theatre. Words alone often flatten experience, especially when dealing with something as complex and non-linear as grief and self-searching. I wanted a form that could hold contradiction, silence, and ambiguity without having to explain them. At the same time, it was very important to me that the piece didn’t slide into musical theatre where songs and melody serve a narrative function. What I wanted instead was a form where music and text could exist side by side as equal forces, without one illustrating the other.

This aligned closely with Vladyslav Kuznetsov’s (composer, pianist) own artistic desire to create a theatre work in which music functions as a character in its own right rather than a more conventional role of emphasising the emotion. In The Sound of Absence, music listens, interrupts, resists, and sometimes withdraws. The pianist becomes a second protagonist and carries a parallel narrative that doesn’t translate into words.

Ivanka Polchenko’s direction was crucial in making this balance possible. Through precise work with rhythm, timing, and silence, she kept music from becoming an illustration and text dominating. That tension gives the piece its shape.

We were also interested in the absence of music as an active artistic choice. When the music stops, the audience is left alone with the moment where sound, silence, and language each carry different meaning.

You retrace your father’s choices without ever being able to question him directly. How did writing the show change the way you hold unanswered questions in your own life?

For a long time, not being able to question my father directly felt like kind of an unsettling personal failure. Writing the show didn’t give me answers in the conventional sense, but it changed my relationship to the questions. I stopped treating them as problems to solve and began to see them as spaces I could stay with patiently. 

As I retraced his life, his refusal of certain medical decisions, his devotion to his work, his emotional restraint, his need for control, I stopped trying to justify them and began to look at the conditions that shaped them: his childhood, his profession, environments where decisiveness meant survival and hesitation meant danger. That shift changed everything. I was no longer judging his choices but trying to understand why they might have been necessary. 

This process taught me that understanding doesn’t always need to come from dialogue. Sometimes it comes from proximity - getting as close as possible to another person’s inner world. By the end of the play, imagining him as a child alone in the frozen well, I understood that some questions remain unanswered because they belong to a part of life that exists beyond explanation. Creating this play helped me accept that silence can hold meaning without resolution. It changed the way I live with uncertainty. I now see unanswered questions and failure and loss as spaces where compassion can exist for him, and for myself.

Your performance is a physical one, how do you prepare for a role like this?

The physical side of the performance itself wasn’t an issue really; I’m a fit person. What was much more interesting, and challenging, was to find how the body could carry meaning without becoming illustrative or performative in an obvious way.

Together with Anna Korzik, we worked very carefully on how each emotional state resonates inside the body first. We spent a lot of time asking simple but demanding questions: Where does anger sit? How does resistance live in the spine? What does emotional restraint do to the breath? Then once something felt truthful, we would place it back into the body through very precise, often minimal movement, and then test how it reads onstage. From there, we built a physical language that could emerge naturally from those inner states rather than being imposed from the outside. It wasn’t about choreography in a traditional sense, but about allowing the body to remember and respond.

Audiences have said the show made them rethink their own relationships with their parents. What conversations do you hope people carry with them after leaving the theatre?

I love hearing that the show prompted people to think differently about their own relationships with their parents and not to necessarily resolve them, but to sit with them. More than anything, I hope the experience gives people permission to feel more comfortable with their own internal questions, especially the parts of their identity that are deeply linked to their upbringing.

I hope audiences allow themselves to breathe in the space of the performance - to slow down, to be affected without immediately needing to understand or label what they’re feeling. So much of our inner life is shaped by inherited stories and expectations, and we rarely give ourselves time to notice how deeply those forces live in us. If the show opens a moment where someone can simply recognise that - without judgement - that already feels meaningful to me. I want the experience to feel liberating. Not because it offers answers, but because it makes space. Space to rethink self-definitions and rediscover a sense of oneself.

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