Who is Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta?
I am an Australian-Ukrainian artist living and working in Naarm. I am also nonbinary. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I am also the most powerful member and de facto leader of the theatre collective, Pummel Squad. I may not be the most physically imposing member of the group, but I am capable of brilliant feats.
What would you do differently from what you do now?
I would love to be less paranoid. I carry a lot of tension in my shoulders like I’m anticipating being walloped in the bag with a big walloping stick. I waddle around hither and thither planning epic comebacks to things strangers will never say, in anticipation of the paranoid fantasies in my head.
I would like to be less angry. Every day I take another step up the calmness stairs to the kingdom of tranquillity at the top. I will rise up. This show we are making is a little bit about being paranoid – maybe I should learn my own damn morals.
Who inspires you and why?
My brother. He’s going to do this eating challenge where he has to eat a massive schnitzel and drink a litre of beer and eat a big bowl of chips. If he wins he’ll get a little Bavarian hat. I’ve always admired those rambunctious beer guzzlers like John Falstaff or the heroes of Rabelais but unfortunately my constitution is too delicate and effete to emulate them myself. He is constantly falling asleep and passing out and it seems that all he lives for is eating large plates of food and drinking beer. He seems like he just sort of goes on quests to find an ice-cream to eat.
UPDATE: He did not succeed, there was too much mass. But it kept us fed for many moons afterwards and I was proud that he tried. He will always have his little Bavarian hat in my mind, plus we learnt that eating challenges are sort of tacky as hell.
What would you do to make a difference in the world?
That’s an excellent question. I would like to plug my show here: because THIS question is very relevant to what we are talking about. “What would one do to make a difference in the world?” I scratched out the hair on my chinny-chin-chin as I pondered this very question many moons ago. (I had lots of help writing this show).
There are many things I would like to do to make a difference. We are trying to make people laugh with this show – but also think, because the world sometimes feels a little bit like a sick joke. We’ve talked a lot about laughing at stuff and satire with this show and how hard it is to make a satire that feels pointed when literally every day there is some crazy new thing that is funnier and stranger than some fiction we could spit out. That is what this show is about. Come and see it.
Favourite holiday destination and why?
If you can get yourself into any sort of enchanted grove or mysterious fog-soaked woods, these are good places to be. Wherever you can be driven slowly insane, smelling fertile dirt and listening to the sound of wood. I’m not allowed to go to such places ATM if I am to remain where I’m at.
But the harder you hit rock bottom, the more forcefully you bounce back up to the top. It’s like terminal velocity. If you throw something bouncy down really hard it will bounce back up higher than if it were only gently dropped. Do you understand?
When friends come to town, what attraction would you take them to, and why?
I would take them to MY show Marginalia. I’m not being funny here, I’m fully serious. I’d pack their sweet cheeks down to fortyfivedownstairs and say “strap into your spanking chair skipper because we are going to take that ass for a ride.”
I think this show is the full package. It’s gonna be exciting, funny, but also deal with some very real things that we all have to live with. The buffoonery of power, the power of buffoons. That sort of thing. You’ll slurp it down your greasy gullet and you’ll love it.
What are you currently reading?
I like to juggle a fiction and non-fiction so I can’t really focus properly on either and forget what they were both about. At the time of writing this I’m finishing off Shame by Salman Rushdie and about halfway through Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson.
I’m a big fan of magical realism. I wish I could write in that long dreamy, annoying way Jorge Luis Borges does but you have to have read every book ever written first to accomplish this, so I am trundling along on my epic quest.
What are you currently listening to?
Lucy and Sam’s Perfect Brains – a very funny podcast with Lucy Beaumont and Sam Campbell. It makes me giggle with glee and slap my little flappers against the ground.
In rehearsal the other day, my friend and collaborator Harry McGee showed me this song called Nobody’s Supposed to be Here by Deborah Cox. I really like it and I keep listening to it over and over again. It makes me feel powerful. I like songs that immediately cheer me up because if I walk around too long I get miserable.
Happiness is?
A beautiful big bouncing ray of sunlight stroking me gently upon the cheeks.
What does the future hold for you?
EGOT winner.
Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta is the co-writer of, and a performer in Pummel Squad’s Marginalia – which will be presented at fortyfivedownstairs from 6 – 16 August 2026. For more information, visit: www.fortyfivedownstairs.com for details.
Image: Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta – photo by Georgia Wiggs (T&T photo agency)