”Nothing else matters really, than the audience’s experience” – Kate Pendry brings her performance My Dinner with Putin to the Festival stage
30.7.2026
Kate Pendry is an actress and playwright from London living and working in Oslo. Renowned for her political and complex works, she has written and produced over fifty pieces for the theatre, alongside numerous electronic artworks and radio productions.
This summer, she is arriving to Tampere Theatre Festival with her performance My Dinner with Putin. Based on a true story, the piece follows Pendry’s brush with Hollywood stardom as she is offered a role in a movie starring Robert De Niro. The film is directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, a known associate of Vladimir Putin. The one-woman, one-camera piece examines ambition, morality and forgoing your principles, whilst taking a look into the inner circles of power.
Tampere Theatre Festival got the opportunity to interview Kate Pendry about the performance and learn more about both the piece and the artist. The interview was conducted via email.
Memoir, controversy, and the actress
My Dinner with Putin (2023) is the first piece in Pendry’s memoir-theatre trilogy, which is followed by 1969: True. Crime. Theatre. (2024). The third part of the trilogy, Conversation with A Monster? is set to premiere at the National Theatre in Oslo in 2027. How did My Dinner with Putin become the starting point for this trilogy?
“Accidentally”, Pendry writes. “It was after we made the second play – 1969: True. Crime. Theatre. – that the theme presented itself. But I think all writing is memoir, isn’t it? Just in different packaging. Perhaps I have a knack for framing (sometimes extreme) life experiences in a way that is accessible. I try to be vigilant when writing, that my work isn’t a piece of self-indulgent wank. It’s all about the audience isn’t it? Nothing else matters really, than the audience’s experience.”
Although Pendry has performed in Finland before, this is the first time My Dinner with Putin is arriving in front of a Finnish audience. What then would be something she would want the audience to know before seeing the perfomance?
”Although this is a ’one-woman performance’ I never think of theatre in terms of that dissection. My closest collaborator is Mads Sjøgård Pettersen – the director of My Dinner with Putin. Along with Audun Aschim our composer, we craft all our performances as a troika”, Pendry writes. “I see theatre as a craft. I have a traditional actress background, but after moving to Norway in the 90’s I was exposed to a cornucopia of music, electronic art and performance art. That combination of traditional theatre discipline (I love Shakespeare), and the experimental is a good mix, I think.”
Kate Pendry has been known to be a divisive artist and her works have garnered both attention and controversy. Controversy also marked her time before the making of My Dinner with Putin.
“I’ve done quite a lot of controversial work in the past – which has made me the focus of some unpleasant people. This was even before the internet kicked off and made bullying a global pastime. I’m not complaining, it’s the way of the world, but before we made Putin I had kept a low profile for a few years, recovering my mental health after a nasty incident when I criticised someone quite famous and the public backlash was brutal.”
Background, love of Shakespeare, and language
As Pendry mentions prior, she loves William Shakespeare. Shakespeare and his works have influenced Pendry’s writing and career as an actress. She got access to his works at a young age and read them aloud to herself.
“First, it was the joy of realising that Shakespeare didn’t belong to the Royal Shakespeare Company, to the posh, well-educated and resource rich companies and filmmakers. In the 70’s when I was a child, there was a perception that you couldn’t do Shakespeare unless you had an entry card to that club. It may be true to this day – the idea that you have to learn how to understand him” Pendry writes.
Reading Shakespeare’s works also influenced the way Pendry uses language in her writing. Her love of language grew through Shakespeare and it allowed her to experience its power.
“Reading Shakespeare has let me take risks with language. And taught me how to bathe in words. The whole world is run on rhetoric. Language shapes how we think. And language is power. Growing up, my family had no economic power, and poverty can make a kid quite frightened. The only power I had was my imagination. They couldn’t take my thoughts away from me. Shakespeare taught me that. What a guy.”
“I was a lonely child, and curious, and picking up a copy of the complete works that was lying around and reading it felt naughty, but also permissible. God bless my mother, who surrounded me with books, but never insisted on me reading. Neither did she censor my reading. For example, I browsed through William Burroughs’ Junkie when I was seven or eight – which was both traumatic and exhilarating” Pendry writes, “And the same was true of Shakespeare. The first speech I ever read was Puck’s epilogue in Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was six, perhaps seven. It was thrilling. Because I kind of understood it. These hieroglyphs re-shaped themselves right before my eyes. And when I said the words out loud. Well, as the great actress Fiona Shaw once said: ‘With Shakespeare, it’s not what you do to the words, it’s what they do to you.’ There is a tantra, a magic in those words, I think.”
Although Kate Pendry is born in the UK, her mother was a post-war migrant from Austria. Pendry mentions that she is “confused by the concept of ‘national identity’”.
“I’m working class. And although I’m born in the UK, my mother was a post-war migrant from Austria – a poor Viennese family. So I am eternally confused by the concept of ’national identity’. Truth be told it scares me. During the world cup I felt like a worried dog during a fireworks display” Pendry notes.
Initially, Pendry had plans of writing a book about the experience of shooting with Mikhalkov. Would this still be something to expect?
“No. I believe the story is told to its fullest in our play. In the end, the story wanted to be told as a play, so we bowed to its insistence.”
My Dinner with Putin | Teatterimonttu | Sat 8.8. 20.00 & Sun 9.8. 13.00 | Buy tickets to My Dinner with Putin here >>
Compiled from an interview with Kate Pendry
Written by Tuike Hakkarainen
Photos: Tormod Lindgren
My Dinner with Putin at Tampere Theatre Festival is supported by:
